MAHATMA GANDHI QUOTES

August 1 :

Economics that hurt the moral wellbeing of an individual or a nation are immoral and therefore sinful. Thus, the economics that permit one country to prey upon another are immoral. It is sinful to buy and use articles made by sweated labour.

YI, 13 Oct. 1921

August 2 :

The economics that disregard moral and sentimental considerations are like wax works that being life-like still lack the life of the living flesh. At every crucial moment these new-fangled economic laws have broken down in practice. And nations or individuals who accept them as guiding maxims must perish.

YI, 27 Oct. 1921

August 3 :

The extension of the law of non-violence in the domain of economics means nothing less than the introduction of moral values as a factor to be considered in regulating international commerce.

YI, 26 Dec. 1924

August 4 :

I wholeheartedly detest this mad desire to destroy distance and time, to increase animal appetites and go to the ends of the earth in search of their satisfaction. If modern civilization stands for all this, and I have understood it to do so, I call it Satanic.

YI, 17 March 1927

August 5 :

I am not aiming at destroying railways or hospitals, though I would certainly welcome their natural destruction. Neither railways nor hospitals are a test of a high and pure civilization. At best they are a necessary evil. Neither adds one inch to the moral statues of a nation.

YI, 26 Jan. 1921

August 6 :

Is the world any the better for quick instruments of locomotion? How do these instruments advance man's spiritual progress? Do they not in the last resort hamper it? And is there any limit to man's ambition? Once we were satisfied with traveling a few miles an hour; today we want to negotiate hundreds of miles an hour; one day we might desire to fly through space. What will be the result? Chaos.

YI, 21 Jan. 1926

August 7 :

It is my firm belief that Europe today represents not the spirit of God or Christianity but the spirit of Satan. And Satan's successes are the greatest when he appears with the name of God on his lips. Europe is today only nominally Christian. In reality it is worshipping Mammon.

YI, 8 Sept. 1920

August 8 :

'Brahma created His people with the duty of sacrifice laid upon them and said; "By this do you flourish. Let it be the fulfiller of all you desires." 'He who eats without performing this sacrifice, eats stolen bread,' thus says the Gita.

H, 29 June 1935

August 9 :

'Earn thy bread by the sweat of thy brow,' says the Bible. Sacrifices may be of many kinds. One of them may well be bread labour. If all laboured for their bread and no more, then there would be enough food and enough leisure for all.

Ibid.

August 10 :

Then there would be no cry of over population, no disease, and no such misery as we see around. Such labour will be the highest form of sacrifice. Men will no doubt do many other things, either through their bodies or through their minds, but all this will be labour of love, for the common good. There will then be no rich and no poor, none high and none low, no touchable and no untouchable.

Ibid.

August 11 :

Even if, without fulfilling the whole law of sacrifice, that is, the law of our being, we perform physical labour enough for our daily bread, we should go along way towards the ideal. If we did so, our wants would be minimized, our food would be simple. We should then eat to l live, not live to eat. Let anyone who doubts the accuracy of this proposition try to sweat for his bread; he will derive the greatest relish from the productions of his labour, improve his health and discover that many things he took were superfluities.

H, 29 June 1935

August 12 :

I cannot picture to myself a time when no man shall be richer than another. But I do picture to myself a time when the rich will spurn to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor and the poor will cease to envy the rich. Even in a most perfect world, we shall fail to avoid inequalities, but we can and must avoid strife and bitterness.

YI, 7 Oct. 1926

August 13 :

The dream I want to realize is not the spoliation of the property of private owners, but to restrict its enjoyment so as to avoid all pauperism, consequent discontent and the hideously ugly contrast that exists today between the lives and surroundings of the rich and the poor.

YI, 21 Nov. 1929

August 14 :

Dead machinery must not be pitted against the millions of living machines represented by the villagers scattered in the seven hundred villages of India.

H, 14 Sept. 1935

August 15 :

Machinery to be well used has to help and ease human effort. The present use of machinery tends more and more to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few in total disregard of millions of men and women whose bread is snatched by it out of their mouths.

Ibid.

August 16 :

The supreme consideration is man. The machine should not tend to make atrophied the limbs of man.

YI, 13 Nov. 1924

August 17 :

What I object to is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such. The craze is for what they call labour-saving machinery. Men go on 'saving labour', till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation.

Ibid.

August 18 :

But why not, it is asked, save the labour of millions, and give them more leisure for intellectual pursuits? Leisure is good and necessary up to a point only, God created man to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, and I dread the prospect of our being able to produce all that we want, including our food stuffs, out of a conjuror's hat.

H, 16 May 1936

August 19 :

I want to save time and labour not for a fraction of mankind, but for all. I want the concentration of wealth, not in the hands of a few, but in the hands of all. Today machinery merely helps a few to ride on the backs of millions. The impetus behind it all is not the philanthropy to save labour, but greed. It is against this constitution of things that I am fighting with all my might.

YI, 13 Nov. 1924

August 20 :

The movement of the spinning wheel is an organized attempt to displace machinery from that state of exclusiveness and exploitation and to place it in its proper state. Under my scheme therefore, men in charge of machinery will think not of themselves or even of the nation to which they belong but of the whole human race.

YI, 17 Sept. 1925

August 21 :

I claim for the Charkha the honour of being able to solve the problem of economic distress in a most natural, simple, inexpensive and businesslike manner. The Charkha, therefore, is not only not useless but is a useful and indispensable article for every home. It is the symbol of the nation's prosperity and, therefore, freedom. It is a symbol not of commercial war of commercial peace.

YI, 8 Dec. 1921

August 22 :

It bears not a message of ill-will towards the nations of the earth but of good-will and self-help. It will not need the protection of a navy threatening a world's peace and exploiting its resources, but it needs the religious determination of millions to spin their yarn in their homes as today they cook their food in their own homes.

Ibid.

August 23 :

As I look at Russia where the apotheosis of industrialization has been reached, the life there does not appeal to me. To use the language of the Bible, 'what shall it avail a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?' In modern terms, it is beneath human dignity to lose one's individuality and become a mere cog in the machine. I want every individual to become a full-blooded, full developed member of the society.

H, 28 Jan. 1939

August 24 :

What does communism mean in the last analysis? It means a classless society an ideal that is worth striving for. Only I part company with it when force is called to aid for achieving it. We are all born equal, but we have all these centuries resisted the will of God. The idea of inequality, of 'high and low', is an evil, but I do not believe in the eradicating evil from the human breast at the point of the bayonet. The human breast does not lend itself to that means.

H, 13 March 1937

August 25 :

Every man has an equal right to the necessaries of life even as birds and beasts have. And since every right carries with it a corresponding duty and the corresponding remedy for resisting any attack upon it, it is merely a matter of finding out the corresponding duties and remedies to vindicate the elementary fundamental equality. The corresponding duty is to labour with my limbs and the corresponding remedy is to non-co-operate with him who deprives me of the fruit of my labour.

YI, 26 March 1931

August 26 :

The true source of rights is duty. If we all discharge our duties, rights will not be far to seek. If leaving duties unperformed we run after rights, they escape us like a will-o'-the-wisp. The more we pursue them, the farther they fly. The same teaching has been embodied by Krihna in the immortal words: ' action alone is thine: leave thou the fruit severely alone,' Action is duty: fruit is the right.

YI, 8 Jan. 1925

August 27 :

Let labour realize its dignity and strength. Capital has neither dignity not strength, compared to labour. These the man in the street also has. In a well-ordered democratic society there is no room, no occasion for lawlessness or strikes. In such a society there are ample lawful means for vindicating justice. Violence, veiled or unveiled, must be taboo.

DD, p. 381

August 28 :

Capital controlled labour because it knew the art of combination. Drops in separation would only fade away; drops in co-operation made the ocean which carried on its broad bosom ocean greyhounds. Similarly if all labouers in any part of the world combined together they could not be tempted by higher wages or could not be tempted by higher wages or helplessly allow themselves to be attracted for, say, a pittance.

H, 7 Sept. 1947

August 29 :

A true and non-violent combination of labour would act like a magnet attracting to it all the needed capital. Capitalists would then exist only as trustees. When that happy day dawned, there would be no difference between capital and labour. The labour will have ample food, good and sanitary dwellings, all the necessary education for their children, ample leisure for self-education and proper medical assistance.

H, 7 Sept. 1947

August 30 :

America is the most industrialized country in the world and yet it has not banished poverty and degradation. That was because it neglected the universal man-power and concentrated power in the hands of the few who amassed fortunes at the expense of the many. The result is that its industrialization has become a menace to its own poor and to the rest of the world.

H, 9 March 1947

August 31 :

If India was to escape such a disaster, it had to imitate what was best in America and other western countries and leave aside its attractive looking but destructive economic policies. Therefore, real planning consisted in the best utilization of the whole manpower of India and the distribution of the raw products of India in her numerous villages instead of sending them outside and re-buying finished articles at fabulous prices.

H, 23 March 1947

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