India Independence Day

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;Where knowledge is free;Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by domestic walls;Where words come out from the depth of truth;Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action--

Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.

Rabindranath Tagore

Gitanjali

How can one be compelled to accept slavery? I simply refuse to do the master's bidding. He may torture me, break my bones to atoms and even kill me. He will then have my dead body, not my obedience. Ultimately, therefore, it is I who am the victor and not he, for he has failed in getting me to do what he wanted done.

Mahatma Gandhi

We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made!

Albert Einstein

If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India!

Romaine Rolland, French scholar

India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most astrictive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only!

Mark Twain

India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border!

Hu Shih, former Ambassador of China to USA

If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I should point to India.

Max Mueller, German scholar

When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.

Albert Einstein

India - The land of Vedas, the remarkable works contain not only religious ideas for a perfect life, but also facts which science has proved true. Electricity, radium, electronics, airship, all were known to the seers who founded the Vedas.

Wheeler Wilcox, American poet

India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

Will Durant, American historian

There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won't go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colors, smells, tastes, and sounds... I had been seeing the world in black & white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor.

Keith Bellows, VP - National Geographic Society

India has two million gods, and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

Mark Twain