Quotes from Indira Gandhi

One must beware of ministers who can do nothing without money, and those who want to do everything with money.

The collective judgment of the electorate must be respected.

I think basically I'm lazy, but I have a housewife's mentality when I go about my job.

I don't think my father was my mentor.

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

I've never turned to anybody for advice and counsel. Even when I was a very small child, I had to stand on my feet because of the circumstances of those times, and somehow, the circumstances have remained more or less the same. I have to take my own decisions.

I myself, in my heart, say that people should have all the children they want. But it's a mistaken idea, like many of our ideas that go back thousands of years, and it must be rooted out.

I'm not interested in one label or the other - I'm only interested in solving certain problems, in getting where I want to go.

Peace we want because there is another war to fight against poverty, disease and ignorance.

You must learn to be still in the midst of activity, and to be vibrantly alive in repose.

I never believed in the danger of a third world war.

When you look at the beginning of the actual war, it's not hard to recognize that the Pakistanis were the ones to attack.

To be liberated, woman must feel free to be herself, not in rivalry to man but in the context of her own capacity and her personality.

The sterilization of men is one method of birth control. The surest, most radical method. To you it seems dreadful. To me it seems that, properly applied, it's by no means dreadful.

Women sometimes go too far, it's true. But it's only when you go too far that others listen.

Every democratic system evolves its own conventions. It is not only the water but the banks which make the river.

My theory is that men are no more liberated than women.

All my games were political games; I was, like Joan of Arc, perpetually being burned at the stake.

Not only Negroes and Jews, but also women are part of a great revolt of which one can only approve.

My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.

Nothing can convince me that people are at one with their work unless they're joyous about it.

You said, 'How is it possible for democracy to work with an illiterate people who are dying of hunger?' But with that people we made a democracy work.

As for the job of prime minister, I like it, yes. But no more than I've liked other work that I've done as an adult.

What good does it do to remain tied to an ideology if you don't achieve anything by it? I have an ideology myself - you can't work in a vacuum; you have to have faith in something.