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






Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge... At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.


Jawaharlal Nehru


Indian Declaration of Independence, on eve of independence, August 15 1947.






We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?


Jawaharlal Nehru


Indian Declaration of Independence, on eve of independence, August 15 1947.






At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength.


Jawaharlal Nehru


Indian Declaration of Independence, on eve of independence, August 15 1947.






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






She (India) has left indelible imprints on one fourth of the human race in the course of a long succession of centuries. She has the right to reclaim ... her place amongst the great nations summarizing and symbolizing the spirit of humanity. From Persia to the Chinese sea, from the icy regions of Siberia to Islands of Java and Borneo, India has propagated her beliefs, her tales, and her civilization!


Sylvia Levi






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






So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.


Mark Twain






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






This is indeed India! The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of traditions, whose yesterday's bear date with the modering antiquities for the rest of nations-the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the world combined.


Mark Twain






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






So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.


Mark Twain






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