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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“If the fundamental rights are opposed by the community, no Law, no Parliament, no Judiciary can guarantee them in the real sense of the word,” said Ambedkar. “What is the use of fundamental rights to the Negro in America, to the Jews in Germany and to the Untouchables in India? As Burke said, there is no method found for punishing the multitude.”
Democracy hasn’t eradicated caste. It has entrenched and modernised it. This is why it’s time to read Ambedkar.
“How are you going to compel people who have acquired a higher status based on birth, without reference to their worth, to vacate that status? How are you going to compel people to recognise the status due to a man, in accordance to his worth, who is occupying a lower status based on his birth?”
“Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.”
“To leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu society, and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap.”
Ordinary politicians oscillate from political expediency to political expediency. A Mahatma can grow from truth to truth.
‘Go and do your own killing. We have done it long enough for you.’
If you are powerful, you can live simply, but you cannot be poor. In South Africa, it took a lot of farmland and organic fruit trees to keep Gandhi in poverty.
On the contrary, Gandhi and his band of passive resisters had made themselves “an object of ridicule and hatred among all sections of the community in South Africa”.161 (A joke among some Blacks and Indians goes like this: Things were good then, back in 1893. Gandhi only got thrown off a train. By 1920, we couldn’t even get on one.162)
The kisans must be advised scrupulously to abide by the terms of their agreement with the zamindars, whether such agreement is written or inferred from custom.
My thirst for money is simply unquenchable. I need at least Rs 200,000—for Khadi, Untouchability and education. The dairy work makes another 50,000. Then there is the Ashram expenditure. No work remains unfinished for want of funds, but God gives after severe trials. This also satisfies me. You can give as you like for whatever work you have faith in.
merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers.
it is a hierarchy in which the divisions of labourers are graded one above the other.
efficiency requires us to develop the capacity of an individual to the point of competency to choose and to make his own career. This principle is violated in the caste system, in so far as it involves an attempt to appoint tasks to individuals in advance—selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the social status of the parents.
To have similar things is totally different from possessing things in common.
I have no hesitation in saying that if the Mahomedan has been cruel, the Hindu has been mean; and meanness is worse than cruelty.
The internal limit to the exercise of sovereignty arises from the nature of the sovereign power itself.
People sometimes ask the idle question, why the Pope does not introduce this or that reform? The true answer is that a revolutionist is not the kind of man who becomes a Pope, and that the man who becomes a Pope has no wish to be a revolutionist.
Dewey, author of about forty books, helped create some of the most prominent political and educational organisations of his time: the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the League for Industrial Democracy, the New York Teachers Union, the American Association of University Professors, and the New School for Social Research.
