Jawaharlal Nehru Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests.

Jawaharlal Nehru
If the world suffers from mental deterioration or from moral degradation, then something goes wrong at the very root of civilization or culture. Even though that civilization may drag out for a considerable period, it grows less and less vital and ultimately tumbles down.

Jawaharlal Nehru
It is always more difficult to fight one's own failings than the power of an adversary.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Our chief defect is that we are more given to talking about things than to doing them.

Jawaharlal Nehru
There is perhaps nothing so bad and so dangerous in life as fear.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Those who are prepared to die for any cause are seldom defeated.

Jawaharlal Nehru
We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?

Jawaharlal Nehru
I am getting old and the sign of old age is that I begin to philosophize and ponder over problems which should not be my concern at all.

Jawaharlal Nehru
It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Only a prisoner who has been confined for long behind high walk can appreciate the extraordinary psychological value of these outside walks and open views.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Restraint does not mean weakness. It does not mean giving in.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Unity must be of the mind and heart, a sense of belonging together and of facing together those who attack it.

Jawaharlal Nehru
The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.

Jawaharlal Nehru
It is better to understand a part of truth and apply it to our lives than to understand nothing at all and flounder helplessly in a vain attempt to pierce the mystery of existence.

Jawaharlal Nehru
It is a fundamental rule of human life, that if the approach is good, the response is good.

Jawaharlal Nehru
At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength.

Jawaharlal Nehru
No country or people who are slaves to dogma and the dogmatic mentality can progress, and unhappily our country and people have become extraordinarily dogmatic and little-minded

Jawaharlal Nehru
The world of today has achieved much, but for all its declared love for humanity, it has based itself far more on hatred and violence than on the virtues that make one human. War is the negation of truth and humanity. War may be unavoidable sometimes, but its progeny are terrible to contemplate. Not mere killing, for man must die, but the deliberate and persistent propagation of hatred and falsehood, which gradually become the normal habits of the people. It is dangerous and harmful to be guided in our life's course by hatreds and aversions, for they are wasteful of energy and limit and twist the mind and prevent it from perceiving truth.

Jawaharlal Nehru
There is only one thing that remains to us, that cannot be taken away: to act with courage and dignity and to stick to the ideals that have given meaning to life.

Jawaharlal Nehru
To be in good moral condition requires at least as much training as to be in good physical condition. But that certainly does not mean asceticism or self-mortification. Nor do I appreciate in the least the idealization of the "simple peasant life." I have almost a horror of it, and instead of submitting to it myself I want to drag out even the peasantry from it, not to urbanization, but to the spread of urban cultural facilities to rural areas.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Ultimately what we really are matters more than what other people think of us. One has to face the modern world with its good as well as its bad and it is better on the whole, I think, that we give even licence than suppress the normal flow of opinion. That is the democratic method. But having laid that down, still I would beg to say that there is a limit to the licence that one can allow, more so in times of great peril to the State.

Jawaharlal Nehru
You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.

Jawaharlal Nehru
America is a country no one should go to for the first time.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Every little thing counts in a crisis and we want our weight felt and our voice heard in quarters which are for the avoidance of world conflict.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Let us be a little humble; let us think that the truth may not perhaps be entirely with us.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Action to be effective must be directed to clearly conceived ends. Life is not all logic, and those ends will have to be varied from time to time to fit in with it, but some end must always be clearly envisaged.

Jawaharlal Nehru
A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and a culture, and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fancies that have moulded them

Jawaharlal Nehru
The person who runs away exposes himself to that very danger more than a person who sits quietly.

Jawaharlal Nehru
The British Government in India is like a tooth that is decaying but is still strongly embedded. It is painful, but it cannot be easily pulled out.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Without peace, all other dreams vanish and are reduced to ashes.

Jawaharlal Nehru