Indian people Quotes (2022-2023)

“Hindus are "a peaceful and innocent people, equally incapable of hurting others or of defending themselves."”

“No Indian ever went outside his own country on a warlike expedition, so righteous were they.”

“Their honesty is proverbial. They borrow and lend on word of mouth, and the repudiation of a debt is almost unknown.”

“If the Indians had remained unknown to the Tartars and to us, they would have been the happiest people in the world.”

“The Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no king like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs.”

“They do not practice deceit, and they keep their sworn obligations. ... They will not take anything wrongfully, and they yield more than fairness requires.””

“The ordinary people … are upright and honourable... They are faithful to their oaths and promises... In their behavior there is much gentleness and sweetness.”

“[The Hindus are] a people, who from the earliest times have been an ornament to the creation – if so much can with propriety be said of any known people upon earth.”

““I have had before me,” says a British judge in India, “hundreds of cases in which a man’s property, liberty and life depended upon his telling a lie, and he has refused to tell it.”

“In India I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it. Inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything but possessed by nothing.”

“I doubt that there is another place on earth where one can be more relaxed than in India, where the country offers you so much attraction and charm and where, at the same time, people are so gentle.”

“'American selves, operating largely within the categories of sexuality, race, and illness, projected onto Indian Others traits that seemed loathsome or illicit: Indians were, among other things, unsanitary, disorderly, promiscuous, and primitive.'”

“When you write `native, 'who do you mean? The Mahommedan who hates the Hindu; the Hindu who hates the Mahommedan; the Sikh who loathes both; or the semi-anglicised product of our Indian colleges who is hated and despised by Sikh, Hindu and Mahommedan.”

“'Westerners found in Indians the very opposite of their rational self-images, exemplars of the undesirable and forbidden … If order is the desideratum of the post-Enlightenment Westerner, the dirt and disorder of India was for the Westerner an object of loathing.'”

“When we read in the valuable production of those great Oriental scholars ... those of a Jones, a Wilkings, a Colebrooke, or a Halhed, - we uniformly discover in the Hindus a nation, whose polished manners are the result of a mild disposition and an extensive benevolence.”

“At the foundation of all other American perceptions was the view that India was a land of mystery, exotic and inscrutable. ... A veil seemed to hang over the country, preventing observers from seeing its features clearly … Even those who understood East Asia, however, confessed themselves baffled by India.”

“I don't like the Indians. [...] Let the Indians squeal. Let the liberals squeal. I want a public relations program developed to piss on the Indians. I want to piss on them for their responsibility. I want the Indians blamed for this, you know what I mean? We can’t let these goddamn, sanctimonious Indians get away with this. They’ve pissed on us on Vietnam for 5 years, Henry.”

“The inhabitants of this land are religious, affectionate, hospitable, genial and frank. They are fond of scientific pursuits, inclined to austerity of life, seekers after justice, contented, industrious, capable in affairs, loyal, truthful and constant… They one and all believe in the unity of God, and as to the reverence they pay to the images of stone and wood and the like, which simpletons regard as idolatry, it is not so.”

“This also is remarkable in India, that all Indians are free, and no Indian at all is a slave. In this the Indians agree with the Lacedaemonians. Yet the Lacedaemonians have Helots for slaves, who perform the duties of slaves; but the Indians have no slaves at all, much less is any Indian a slave.”

“It was the celebrated Friedrich Max Muller who gave the last two testimonies in a 1882 lecture in defence of the “Character of the Hindus,” and he observed: It is surely extremely strange that whenever, either in Greek, or in Chinese, or in Persian, or in Arab writings, we meet with any attempts at describing the distinguishing features in the national character of the Indians, regard for truth and justice should always be mentioned first.”

“What Indians don’t specialize in is grievance. There is no Indian lobby pushing for increased “representation” in this or that economic or political sector, no pressure group ululating for ethnic enclaves, or for information to be provided in a language other than English. You won’t be told, when you call your bank, to “press 2 for Telugu.” You won’t have Indian parents at American public schools clamoring for special dispensations for their children.”

“The Indians, as known to all nations for many centuries, are the metal [essence] of wisdom, the source of fairness and objectivity. They are peoples of sublime pensiveness, universal apologues, and useful and rare inventions. In spite of the fact that their color is in the first stage of blackness, which puts them in the same category as the blacks, Allah, in His glory, did not give them the low characters, the poor manners, or the inferior principles associated with this group and ranked them above a large number of white and brown peoples.”

“Indians tend to be more relaxed in unpredictable situations than westerners. Indians indeed find it natural to engage in non-linear thinking, juxtaposing opposites and tackling complexities that cannot be reduced to simple concepts or terms. They may be said even to thrive on ambiguity, doubt, uncertainty, multitasking, and in the absence of centralized authority and normative codes. Westerners, by contrast, tend by and large to be fearful of unpredictable or decentralized situations. They regard these situations as 'problems' to be 'fixed'.”

“Besides the particular denominations which they receive from the casts and countries in which they are born, there is one more general, which is applied indiscriminately, to distinguish the original natives from all who have intruded themselves amongst them. Hindoo, from whence Indian, and throughout the millions of Indians which inhabit Indostan, although situated at such distances as would suffice to form them into several distinct nations, are visible the strongest marks of one general character, in their dispositions, in their observances, and in their form.”

“Scant justice is done to her position in the world by those histories which recount the exploits of her invaders and leave the impression that her own people were a feeble, dreamy folk, sundered from the rest of mankind by their sea and mountain frontiers. Such a picture takes no account of the intellectual conquests of the Hindus. Even their political conquests were not contemptible and were remarkable for the distance if not for the extent of the territory occupied. ... But such military or commercial invasions are insignificant compared with the spread of Indian thought.”