Jawaharlal Nehru Quotes

90 Sourced Quotes

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

Jawaharlal Nehru
Democracy and socialism are means to an end, not the end itself.

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

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

Jawaharlal Nehru
If in the modern world wars have unfortunately to be fought (and they do, it seems) then they must be stopped at the first possible moment, otherwise they corrupt us, they create new problems and make our future even more uncertain. That is more than morality; it's sense.

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

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
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
The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India's age-long culture and civilization, ever changing, ever flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Wars are fought to gain a certain objective. War itself is not the objective; victory is not the objective; you fight to remove the obstruction that comes in the way of your objective. If you let victory become the end in itself then you've gone astray and forgotten what you were originally fighting about.

Jawaharlal Nehru
When the present is full of gloom, the past becomes haven of refuge that provides relief and inspiration.

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

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
I knew that Gandhiji usually acts on instinct (I prefer to call it that than the "inner voice" or an answer to prayer) and very often that instinct is right. He has repeatedly shown what a wonderful knack he has of sensing the mass mind and of acting at the psychological moment. The reasons which he afterward adduces to justify his action are usually afterthoughts and seldom carry one very far. A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Socialism is... not only a way of life, but a certain scientific approach to social and economic problems.

Jawaharlal Nehru
At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.
Immediately prior to Independence

Jawaharlal Nehru
Obviously, the highest type of efficiency is that which can utilize existing material to the best advantage.

Jawaharlal Nehru
Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.
Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system. And because we have tolerated our past and present evils, international affairs are poisoned and law and justice have disappeared from them.

Jawaharlal Nehru
We must constantly remind ourselves that whatever our religion or creed, we are all one people. I regret that many recent disturbances have given us a bad name. Many have acquiesced to the prevailing spirit. This is not citizenship. Citizenship consists in the service of the country. We must prevail on the evil-doers to stop their activities. If you, men of the Navy, the Army and the Air Force, serve your countrymen without distinction of class and religion, you will bring honour to yourselves and to your country.

Jawaharlal Nehru
The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.
And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

Jawaharlal Nehru
To be successful in life what you need is education.

Jawaharlal Nehru
The Bhagavad Gita deals essentially with the spiritual foundation of human existence. It is a call of action to meet the obligations and duties of life; yet keeping in view the spiritual nature and grander purpose of the universe.

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
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