Top 60 Shashi Tharoor Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “History belongs in the past; but understanding it is the duty of the present.”

— Shashi Tharoor

2. “India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”

— Shashi Tharoor

3. “All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes.”

— Shashi Tharoor

4. “The sun never set on the British empire, an Indian nationalist later sardonically commented, because even God couldn’t trust the Englishman in the dark.”

— Shashi Tharoor

5. “Everything is recycled in India, even dreams.”

— Shashi Tharoor

6. “The ISI may well be Pakistan’s answer to the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, Roman nor an empire: it.”

— Shashi Tharoor

7. “We literally paid for our own oppression.”

— Shashi Tharoor

8. “The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present.”

— Shashi Tharoor

9. “India is not an underdeveloped country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”

— Shashi Tharoor

10. “Whosoever comes to me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.”

— Shashi Tharoor

11. “Rabindranath Tagore put it gently to a Western audience in New York in 1930: ‘A great portion of the world suffers from your civilisation.’ Mahatma Gandhi was blunter: asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, ‘It would be a good idea’. ‘The.”

— Shashi Tharoor

12. “India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal.”

— Shashi Tharoor

13. “In debate he thought high and aimed low.”

— Shashi Tharoor

14. “Bombs and bullets alone cannot destroy India, because Indians will pick their way through the rubble and carry on as they have done throughout history.”

— Shashi Tharoor

15. “I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself.”

— Shashi Tharoor

16. “The Mahabharata declares, ‘What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere.”

— Shashi Tharoor

17. “Alex von Tunzelmann’s clever start to her book Indian Summer made my point most tellingly: ‘In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semifeudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.”

— Shashi Tharoor

18. “If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali – a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast.”

— Shashi Tharoor

19. “While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate.”

— Shashi Tharoor

20. “When an Englishman wants something, George Bernard Shaw observed, he never publicly admits to his wanting it; instead, his want is expressed as ‘a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who possess the thing he wants’. Durant is scathing about this pretence: ‘Hypocrisy was added to brutality, while the robbery went on.’ And.”

— Shashi Tharoor

21. “Why does man need bread? To survive. But why survive if it is only to eat more bread? To live is more than just to sustain life – it is to enrich, and be enriched by, life.”

— Shashi Tharoor

22. “He leaned towards the young man, his eyes, mouth and face all round in concentration. ‘“There was a banned crow,”’ he intoned sonorously. ‘“There was a cold day.” Not bad, eh? I learned those on the boat. Sounds like perfect Urdu, I’m told.’ He paused and frowned. ‘The devil of it is remembering which one means, “close the door,” and which one will get someone to open it.”

— Shashi Tharoor

23. “I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. Rather I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself. The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge. One.”

— Shashi Tharoor

24. “We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of history and historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads, and the mud of the future on our feet.”

— Shashi Tharoor

25. “Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion that should be able to assert itself without threatening others.”

— Shashi Tharoor

26. “Above all, as a Hindu I belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. I find it immensely congenial to be able to face my fellow human beings of other faiths without being burdened by the conviction that I am embarked upon a “true path” that they have missed.”

— Shashi Tharoor

27. “Forget heaven and hell, yaar,” he says as he leaves. “It’s purgatory I’m concerned about. We call it Earth.”

— Shashi Tharoor

28. “Muslim sociologists and anthropologists have argued that Islam in rural India is more Indian than Islamic, in the sense that the faith as practiced by the ordinary Muslim villagers reflects the considerable degree of cultural assimilation that has occurred between Hindus and Muslims in their daily lives.”

— Shashi Tharoor

29. “Indians paid, in other words, for the privilege of being conquered by the British.”

— Shashi Tharoor

30. “History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions. The.”

— Shashi Tharoor

31. “In Indian culture, the woman of the house – the embodiment of the family’s honor – treasures her gold jewelry both as her soundest asset and as the symbol of her status.”

— Shashi Tharoor

32. “Pakistan was created by Jinnah’s will and Britain’s willingness’ – not by Nehru’s wilfulness.”

— Shashi Tharoor

33. “Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time.”

— Shashi Tharoor

34. “An India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us. This would be a second Partition: and a partition in the Indian soul would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil. For my sons, the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. An India neither Hindu nor Muslim, but both. That is the only India that will allow them to continue to call themselves Indians.”

— Shashi Tharoor

35. “While God waits for his temple to be built of love, man brings stones.’ Or.”

— Shashi Tharoor

36. “It was not just the maharajas who had to suffer: every Indian schoolchild must lament the influence of the British dress code on Indians – especially the tie as a permanent noose around the necks of millions of schoolchildren, in India’s sweltering heat, even today.”

— Shashi Tharoor

37. “India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal. But I seek nothing from history – only an account of itself.”

— Shashi Tharoor

38. “Democracy, Ganapathi, is perhaps the most arrogant of all forms of government, because only democrats presume to represent an entire people: monarchs and oligarchs have no such pretensions. But democracies that turn authoritarian go a step beyond arrogance; they claim to represent a people subjugating themselves. India was now the laboratory of this strange political experiment. Our people would be the first in the world to vote on their own subjugation.”

— Shashi Tharoor

39. “Gangaji’s truth required activism, not passivity.”

— Shashi Tharoor

40. “Nehru, speaking of his country’s dreams, said: ‘Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for 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.’ It.”

— Shashi Tharoor

41. “When a marauder destroys your house and takes away your cash and jewellery, his responsibility for his actions far exceeds that of the servant who opened door to him, whether out of fear, cupidity or because he simply he didn’t know any better.”

— Shashi Tharoor

42. “When we kill people, we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.”

— Shashi Tharoor

43. “The principles he stood for and the way in which he asserted them were always easier to admire than to follow.”

— Shashi Tharoor

44. “As I was typing this last sentence, somewhat hastily, my computer’s spellcheck offered ‘Brutish’ as an acceptable substitute for ‘British’ rule in India!”

— Shashi Tharoor

45. “If ever the Empire comes to ruin, Heaslop, mark my words, the British publisher will be to blame.”

— Shashi Tharoor

46. “It is precisely faith that makes thinking possible, for faith offers the unthought ground out of which thinking can emerge. It is faith that makes moral and other decisions possible, opening to us the horizon against which our actions become meaningful.”

— Shashi Tharoor

47. “If you believed in truth and cared enough to obtain it, Ganga affirmed, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it. It was essential to accept punishment willingly in order to demonstrate the strength of one’s convictions. That.”

— Shashi Tharoor

48. “On Gandhi: Don’t ever forget, that we were not lead by a saint with his head in clouds, but by a master tactician with his feet on the ground.”

— Shashi Tharoor

49. “Jawaharlal Nehru’s first Cabinet list set a standard that would never again be matched, while establishing a precedent for diversity that all his successors would strive to emulate. A.”

— Shashi Tharoor

50. “Hinduism as a faith might espouse tolerance, this does not necessarily mean that all Hindus behave tolerantly.”

— Shashi Tharoor