Quotes About Gandhi

I would neither defend myself from him, nor would I fight him. For the longest time, against the counsel of all who cared about me, I resisted even consulting a lawyer, because I considered even that to be an act of war. I wanted to be all Gandhi about this. I wanted to be all Nelson Mandela about this. Not realizing at the time that both Gandhi and Mandela were lawyers.

The principle of self defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi.

I don't believe in anarchy, because it will ultimately amount to the power of the bully, with weapons. Gandhi is my life's inspiration: passive resistance. I don't want to live in the Thunderdome with Mad Max.

Gandhi protested against restrictive policies. So did 'Guru.'

The detailing on the sets of 'Gandhi' was very minute. There was immense discipline and nothing was taken for granted.

He never was the pure pacifist he's made out to be anyway. He always approved of the use of violence as a last resort. Like during one of the periods when Hindus and Muslims came to deadly blows. You didn't hear this in the movie, but when the Nawab of Maler Kolta issued and order to shoot ten muslims for every Hindu who was killed in the state, Gandhi gave it his blessing

It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.

the industrialist G. D. Birla, one of Gandhi's big financial backers. (As someone once said, 'it costs a great deal of money to keep Gandhiji living in poverty'.)

I have felt that the Gita teaches us that what cannot be followed in day-to-day practice cannot be called religion.

Ashram means a community of men of religion. I feel that an ashram was a necessity of life for me.

Non-co-operation intended to pave the way to real honourable and voluntary co-operation based on mutual respect and trust.

Where else could the most famous female dacoit, Phoolan Devi, surrender to police with ten thousand onlookers cheering as she placed her rifle down before a picture of Gandhi? (After serving her prison sentence, the "Bandit Queen of India" was elected to Parliament, only to be gunned down in front of her house in New Delhi before she turned forty.

My knowledge of the letter of the Shastras is better, but of true religion they are able to give me but little.

Imitation is the sincerest flattery.

Gandhi's strategy for national liberation never – this is true – condoned violence against the British, but it did include violence with them.

Martin Luther King – his moral compass a wonder of reliability next to Gandhi's – endorsed this distinction in his apologia for the urban riots of 1967: 'Violent they certainly were. But the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people',

It is said that Mahatma Gandhi, when asked about Western civilization, remarked, 'I think it would be a good idea.' That's how I feel about intelligent life on Earth, especially when I think about the question of what truly intelligent life might look like elsewhere in the universe.

The script was focused on how Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi turned into the Mahatma. There was no room for many others who mattered in the making of India. There was no space for Subhas Chandra Bose or Rajaji that an Indian director might have been pressured to include. This process of elimination was necessary.

Satyagraha as conceived by me is a science in the making.

In his last letter to Hitler, on December 1941, Gandhi praised the Führer's 'bravery [and] devotion to your Fatherland . . . Nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents.'82 Gandhi was fortunate that it was the Viceroy who ruled India rather than Hitler; the Führer's advice to Lord Halifax when they met at Berchtesgaden in 1937 had been 'Shoot Gandhi.

I came to Bombay in January 1981. It was primarily for 'Gandhi.'

I believe that Gandhi was correct. Non-violent civil disobedience is the only way to bring about change that allows people to enjoy the change and not get killed in the process.

There is a scene in Richard Attenborough's biopic where Gandhi argues with his wife because she refuses to clean their latrine. She says it is the work of untouchables; he tells her there is no such thing. Gandhi's tactics of encouraging brotherly love across caste boundaries and urging Indians to clean their own latrines had failed miserably.

violence exercised in self-defense, which all societies from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and legal. The principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi, who sanctioned it for those unable to master pure nonviolence.