Top 120 Jawaharlal Nehru Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The basic fact of today is the tremendous pace of change in human life.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

52. “Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse. So we are forced to accept democracy. It has good points and also bad. But merely saying that democracy will solve all problems is utterly wrong. Problems are solved by intelligence and hard work.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

53. “I am the last Englishman to rule in India.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

54. “Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

55. “Without peace, all other dreams vanish and are reduced to ashes.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

56. “It is a fundamental rule of human life, that if the approach is good, the response is good.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

57. “It is the habit of every aggressor nation to claim that it is acting on the defensive.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

58. “Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

59. “The future has to be lived before it can be written about.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

60. “Obviously, the highest type of efficiency is that which can utilize existing material to the best advantage.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

61. “Time is not measured by the years that pass by, instead by the things you do, feel or accomplish...”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

62. “Blood and tears are going to be our lot, whether we like them or not. Our blood and tears will flow; maybe the parched soil of India needs them so that the fine flower of freedom may grow again.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

63. “The only alternative to coexistence is codestruction.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

64. “There is perhaps nothing so bad and so dangerous in life as fear.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

65. “It is far better to know our own weaknesses and failures than to point out those of others.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

66. “The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

67. “For the first time i began to think, consciously and deliberately of religion and other worlds. The Hindu religion especially went up in my estimation; not the ritual or ceremonial part, but it’s great books, the “Upnishads”, and the “Bhagavad Gita”.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

68. “Politics and Religion are obsolete. The time has come for Science and Spirituality.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

69. “The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere following Gandhi’s assassination.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

70. “I have long believed that the only way peace can be achieved is through world government.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

71. “As fear is a close companion to falsehood, so truth follows fearlessness.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

72. “Action to be effective must be directed to clearly conceived ends.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

73. “The man who has gotten everything he wants is all in favor of peace and order.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

74. “India has known the innocence and insouciance of childhood, the passion and abandon of youth, and the ripe wisdom of maturity that comes from long experience of pain and pleasure; and over and over a gain she has renewed her childhood and youth and age.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

75. “History is the record of human progress, a record of the struggle of the advancement of the human mind, of the human spirit, towards some known or unknown objective.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

76. “I have always thought that the best way to find out what is right and what is not right, what should be done and what should not be done, is not to give a sermon, but to talk and discuss, and out of discussion sometimes a little bit of truth comes out.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

77. “It is now clear that science is incapable of ordering life. A life is ordered by values.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

78. “But if we go in for reservations on communal and caste basis, we swamp the bright and able people and remain second-rate or third-rate. I am grieved to learn of how far this business of reservation has gone based on communal considerations. It has amazed me to learn that even promotions are based sometimes on communal or caste considerations. This way lies not only folly, but disaster. Let us help the backward groups by all means, but never at the cost of efficiency.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

79. “Logic and cold reason are poor weapons to fight fear and distrust. Only faith and generosity can overcome them.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

80. “Our chief defect is that we are more given to talking about things than to doing them.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

81. “Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

82. “I am getting old and the sign of old age is that I begin to philosophize and ponder over problems which should not be my concern at all.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

83. “All the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible, so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

84. “The person who runs away exposes himself to that very danger more than a person who sits quietly.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

85. “A man who is afraid will do anything.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

86. “Theoretical approaches have their place and are, I suppose, essential but a theory must be tempered with reality.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

87. “I do not attach much importance to America’s bombs. I attach importance to her great vitality and integrity. The strength of America is deeper and more significant than her financial power.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

88. “The art of a people is a true mirror of their minds.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

89. “To be in good moral condition requires at least as much training as to be in good physical condition.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

90. “Those who are prepared to die for any cause are seldom defeated.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

91. “Unity must be of the mind and heart, a sense of belonging together and of facing together those who attack it.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

92. “I was taught by a great man, never to hate – and never to fear.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

93. “No country or people who are slaves to dogma and the dogmatic mentality can progress, and unhappily our country and people have become extraordinarily dogmatic and little-minded.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

94. “And yet fear builds its phantoms which are more fearsome than reality itself, and reality, when calmly analysed and its consequences willingly accepted, loses much of its terror.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

95. “It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of human ity.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

96. “There is only one thing that remains to us, that cannot be taken away: to act with courage and dignity and to stick to the ideals that have given meaning to life.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

97. “Great causes and little men go ill together.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

98. “If the world suffers from mental deterioration or from moral degradation, then something goes wrong at the very root of civilization or culture. Even though that civilization may drag out for a considerable period, it grows less and less vital and ultimately tumbles down.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

99. “America is a country no one should go to for the first time.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru

100. “A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and a culture, and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fancies that have moulded them.”

— Jawaharlal Nehru