“I’ve never understood women who, because of their children, pose as victims and don’t allow themselves any other activities.”

I don’t mind if my life goes in the service of the nation. If I die, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation.

You don’t help a country by supporting a military regime that denies any sign of democracy, and what defeated Pakistan was its military regime.

I learned very soon to get along by myself.

I cannot understand how anyone can be an Indian and not be proud.

When it’s impossible, it’s better to stoop to compromise, without resisting and without complaining. People who complain are selfish.

There is not love where there is no will.

My father was a saint. I’m not.

It is our duty to create a social milieu in which the young and the socially weak feel that the present and future belong to them.

The old need the company of the young so that they renew their contact with life.

To become capable, one must have faith in oneself.

It’s not right to say that my father influenced me more than others, and I wouldn’t be able to say whether my personality was formed more by my father or my mother or the Mahatma [Gandhi] or the friends who were with us.

To be a mother, a housewife, never cost me any sacrifice – I savored every minute of those years.

Every new experience brings its own maturity and a greater clarity of vision.

In all communities you find groups that behave badly. But you must understand them too.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb something.

I was a funky kid.

I grew up all around the Bay, but I spent most of my time in Hayward and I loved it. It was a really big apartment community, there was a whole bunch of kids.

As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by survival of the fittest.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t bad kids. They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.

No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I’m not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

I guess the real reason that my wife and I had children is the same reason that Napoleon had for invading Russia: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Why, I just shake the buildings out of my sleeves.

The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.