Gandhi and Churchill Quotes

“The two came to differ on many, if not most, issues. But the man who would single-handedly defy Hitler in 1940 against all odds bears a striking resemblance to the man who organized the first satyagraha campaign in South Africa.”
― Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

“Villagers still worship at shrines dedicated to gods and goddesses with roots in the Stone Age.12 Compared to this unequaled staying power, the British Raj seemed very transitory—like every other ruler or conqueror in Indian history. Gandhi made his own view plain in 1909, in his Hind Swaraj. “History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of love or of the soul,” he wrote, “a record of the interruption of the course of nature.”
― Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

“But for those at the top of Indian society, British rule brought an administration that was fair, uncorrupt, and comfortably distant. Indian elites in the three presidencies of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay were content to submit to the East India Company’s rules, serve in its armies, and help it collect money to pay for them as long as they were left alone to get on with their normal affairs. It was for those at the bottom, especially in eastern India, that the British brought disaster. This”
― Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

“The basic lesson of Indian history was already established. Material power like kingdoms, and kings, including Alexander the Great, comes and goes. But spiritual power, embodied in religion and caste and spiritual unity with Brahman, the changeless essence of the universe, lasts forever. Prime”
― Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

“The Aryans also composed two of the world’s greatest (and longest) epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which is eight times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey put together and three times longer than the Bible—all without the benefit of writing. These Vedic recitations, both sacred and secular, form the bedrock of Indian and Hindu culture. The”
― Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

“By 2200 B.C.E., five hundred years before Hammurabi issued his law code in Babylon, the civilization of the Indus Valley was a flourishing urban world of small brick houses and straight narrow streets, clean, efficient, and uniform, ruled by all-powerful theocrats whose temples were the very cities themselves.14”
― Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

“Another task was emptying the house’s chamber pots, a constant chore in a large house with a wife and three children, including his nephew, twelve servants and staff, and only one indoor toilet.”
― Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

“Like Churchill, indeed like other late Victorians, Gandhi was obsessed with standards of manliness and masculinity. Not surprisingly, physical courage was to them both a crucial measure of male character.9”
― Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age

“Then one day he returned from school to learn he was going to be married. He was thirteen—certainly not too young for the prearranged marital match that was considered essential to a Hindu household. His bride Kasturbai Makanji, also thirteen, was the daughter of a merchant who lived only a few doors down from the Gandhis’ old house in Porbandar.”
― Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age