Top 90 Amitav Ghosh Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Already the sahibs have done more to keep the lower castes in their places than our Hindu kings did over hundreds of years.”

— Amitav Ghosh

52. “It is by worrying about adversity that people survive; complacency brings catastrophe.”

— Amitav Ghosh

53. “The only way to find out was to try.”

— Amitav Ghosh

54. “It is madness to think that knowing a language and reading a few books can create allegiances between people. Thoughts, books, ideas, words – if anything, they make you more alone, because they destroy whatever instinctive loyalties you may once have possessed.”

— Amitav Ghosh

55. “There are few expressions in the English language that are less attractive to women than ‘Rare Book Dealer.”

— Amitav Ghosh

56. “Democracy is a wonderful thing, Mr Burnham,’ he said wistfully. ‘It is a marvellous tamasha that keeps the common people busy so that men like ourselves can take care of all matters of importance. I hope one day India will also be able to enjoy these advantages – and China too, of course.”

— Amitav Ghosh

57. “Thinking about it later he understood that a battle was a distillation of time: many years of preparation and decades of innovation and change were squeezed into a clash of very short duration. And when it was over the impact radiated backwards and forwards through time, determining the future.”

— Amitav Ghosh

58. “The absence of food doesn’t make a man forsake hunger-it only makes him hungrier .”

— Amitav Ghosh

59. “Why should we try, why not just take the world as it is? I told her how he had said that we had to try because the alternative wasn’t blankness – it only meant that if we didn’t try ourselves, we would never be free of other people’s inventions.”

— Amitav Ghosh

60. “If you’re in command, it’s always your fault.”

— Amitav Ghosh

61. “She remembered a word he’d often used, karuna-one of the Buddha’s words, Pali for compassion, for the immanence of all living things in each other, for the attraction of life for its likeness. A time will come, he had said to the girls, when you too will discover what this word karuna means, and from that moment on, your lives will never again be the same.”

— Amitav Ghosh

62. “Is it not amazing, Puggly dear, that whenever we begin to congratulate ourselves on the breadth of our knowledge of the world, we discover that there are multitudes of people, in every corner of the earth, who have seen vastly more than we can ever hope to?”

— Amitav Ghosh

63. “That was the ace hidden up the sleeves of the Jardines, Mathesons and Dents of the world. Despite all their cacklings about Free Trade, the truth was that their commercial advantages had nothing to do with markets or trade or more advanced business practices – it lay in the brute firepower of the British Empire’s guns and gunboats.”

— Amitav Ghosh

64. “Just as novels have come to be seen as narratives of identity, so too has politics become, for many, a search for personal authenticity, a journey of self-discovery.”

— Amitav Ghosh

65. “Thoughts, books, ideas, words – if anything, they make you more alone, because they destroy whatever instinctive loyalties you may once have possessed.”

— Amitav Ghosh

66. “This is how power is eclipsed: in a moment of vivid realism, between the waning of one fantasy of governance and its replacement by the next; in an instant when the world springs free of its mooring of dreams and reveals itself to be girdled in the pathways of survival and self-preservation. The.”

— Amitav Ghosh

67. “I had a book in my hands to while away the time and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book – a compilation of pages that overlap without two ever being the same. People open the book according to their taste and training, their memories and desires. On occasion these pages are ruled with lines that are invisible to some people, while being for others, as real, as charged and as volatile as high-voltage cables.”

— Amitav Ghosh

68. “That happens you know, as you grow older – you can’t tell the dreams from the memories.”

— Amitav Ghosh

69. “Was it possible that some men possessed so great a force of character that they could stamp themselves upon their words such that no matter where they were read, or when, or in what language, their own distinctive tones would always be heard?”

— Amitav Ghosh

70. “How do you fight an enemy who fights from neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?”

— Amitav Ghosh

71. “Oh shame on you, who call yourself a Christian! Do you not see that it is the grossest idolatry to speak of the market as though it were the rival of God?”

— Amitav Ghosh

72. “Jesus Christ is Free Trade and Free Trade is Jesus Christ.” Truer words, I believe, were never spoken. If it is God’s will that opium be used as an instrument to open China to his teachings, then so be it.”

— Amitav Ghosh

73. “And to imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be.”

— Amitav Ghosh

74. “Nabadwip, a centre of piety and learning consecrated to the memory of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu – saint, mystic, and devotee of Sri Krishna.”

— Amitav Ghosh

75. “In a way it was a relief to be spared the responsibilities that came with a knowledge of the details of another life.”

— Amitav Ghosh

76. “THE PREVALENCE OF the word “New” in maps of the Americas and Australia points to one of the most important aspects of European expansion: ecological and topographic transformation.”

— Amitav Ghosh

77. “That the world of today presents all the symptoms of demonic possession.”

— Amitav Ghosh

78. “The war, when it comes, will not be for opium. It will be for a principle: for freedom – for the freedom of trade and for the freedom of the Chinese people. Free Trade is a right conferred on Man by God, and its principles apply as much to opium as to any other article of trade. More so perhaps, since in its absence many millions of natives would be denied the lasting advantages of British influence.”

— Amitav Ghosh

79. “Sometimes, the lascars would gather between the bows to listen to the stories of the greybeards. There was the steward, Cornelius Pinto: a grey-haired Catholic, from Goa, he claimed to have been around the world twice, sailing in every kind of ship, with every kind of sailor – including Finns, who were known to be the warlocks and wizards of the sea, capable of conjuring up winds with a whistle.”

— Amitav Ghosh

80. “The Tang went into decline and people became discontented. There was hunger and unrest, and as is common at such times, the troublemakers looked to place the blame on the foreigners.”

— Amitav Ghosh

81. “If there was an implicit self-hatred in trusting only your own, then how much deeper was the self-loathing that led a group of men to distrust someone for no reason other than that he was one of them?”

— Amitav Ghosh

82. “To scuttle a boat you don’t have to rip out the whole bottom, you just need to remove a few planks, one by one.”

— Amitav Ghosh

83. “Stars and planets, after all, travelled on predictable orbits – but the wind, nobody knew where the wind would choose to go.”

— Amitav Ghosh

84. “Bill McKibben wrote, ‘We live in a post-natural world.’ But did ‘Nature’ in this sense ever exist? Or was it rather the deification of the human that gave it an illusory apartness from ourselves? Now that non-human agencies have dispelled that illusion, we are confronted suddenly with a new task: that of finding other ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era.”

— Amitav Ghosh

85. “I think Compton is right when he says that the reason the English use this word is because it is they who think of us as ‘barbarians’. They want war, so they are looking for excuses and even a word will do.”

— Amitav Ghosh

86. “Some day, following the example of men like themselves, said Mr Fraser, the Chinese too would take to Free Trade:.”

— Amitav Ghosh

87. “I felt all of existence swelling in my veins. Letting my umbrella drop, I flung back my head to open myself to the wind and the suns. It was as though in the course of one night I had cast away the emptiness I had so long held in my arms.”

— Amitav Ghosh

88. “It was as if the two women represented the poles of his desires, one of them forthright, spontaneous and simple in her tastes; the other engimatic, sophisticated, wedded to luxury.”

— Amitav Ghosh

89. “Mere shame couldn’t, after all, be counted on to provide the escape of death.”

— Amitav Ghosh

90. “From the older ox the younger learns to plough.”

— Amitav Ghosh

91. “Have we not done enough by our duty, Shireen? Do we not also have a duty to ourselves?”

— Amitav Ghosh