Top 94 Shashi Tharoor Quotes
#1. but as an Indian, I find it far easier to forgive than to forget.
Shashi Tharoor
#2. India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal.
Shashi Tharoor
#3. (The Hindu's first issue counted a grand total of eighty copies, printed with 'one rupee and eight annas' of borrowed money by a group of four law students and two teachers). In
Shashi Tharoor
#4. A witticism in an airport security line is like a Swiss tap - turn it on, and you instantly find yourself in hot water.
Shashi Tharoor
#5. The roots of India's soft power run deep. India's is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom, to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and Muslims.
Shashi Tharoor
#6. In China, national priorities are established by the Government and then funded by the state; in India, priorities emerge from seemingly endless discussions and arguments amongst myriad interests, and funds have to be found where they might.
Shashi Tharoor
#7. As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downstream. We are all interconnected, and we can no longer afford the luxury of not thinking about the rest of the planet in anything we do.
Shashi Tharoor
#8. 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
#9. India shaped my mind, anchored my identity, influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am ... India matters to me and I would like to matter to India.
Shashi Tharoor
#10. The Chinese, as befits a Communist autocracy, approached the task of dominating the Olympics with top-down military discipline.
Shashi Tharoor
#11. The naval expansionism of the southern Chola and Pallava empires took Indian influences directly to Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia and Cambodia. Later,
Shashi Tharoor
#12. As an Indian, and now as a politician and a government minister, I've become rather concerned about the hype we're hearing about our own country, all this talk about India becoming a world leader, even the next superpower.
Shashi Tharoor
#13. Whereas China has set about systematically striving for Olympic success since it re-entered global competition after years of isolation, India has remained complacent about its lack of sporting prowess.
Shashi Tharoor
#14. A highly developed country of the past, in an advanced state of decay).
Shashi Tharoor
#15. Freedom of the press is the mortar that binds together the bricks of democracy
and it is also the open window embedded in those bricks.
Shashi Tharoor
#16. (Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the
Shashi Tharoor
#17. There was a time when bright people had few prospects for higher education and good jobs here. But that is changing. India is no longer seen as an undesirable place to work or pursue research.
Shashi Tharoor
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Bengalis say when offered cod, we still have other fish to fry.
Shashi Tharoor
#22. Global challenges also require global solutions, and few indeed are the situations in which the United States or any other country can act completely alone.
Shashi Tharoor
#23. Western dictionaries define secularism as absence of religion but Indian secularism does not mean irreligiousness.It means profusion of religions.
Shashi Tharoor
#24. I returned to India because I believe in an India of honesty and hard work, not of corruption and crookedness. I believe in an India of openness and straightforwardness, not of hypocrisy and double-dealing. I believe in an India where opportunities are available to all, and not just to a chosen few.
Shashi Tharoor
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Europe's history of trading relations with India is borne out in the writings of the ancient historians Herodotus, Pliny, Petronius and Ptolemy, and
Shashi Tharoor
#28. The ISI may well be Pakistan's answer to the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, Roman nor an empire: it
Shashi Tharoor
#29. The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts.
Shashi Tharoor
#30. The Internet is emblematic of an era in which what happens in Southeast Asia or southern Africa - from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against aids - can affect Americans. As has been observed about water pollution, we all live downstream now.
Shashi Tharoor
#31. The steep decline in America's image and standing after 9/11 is a direct reflection of global distaste for the instruments of American hard power: the Iraq invasion, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, Blackwater's killings of Iraqi civilians.
Shashi Tharoor
#32. Resolutions aren't self-executing. Somebody has to provide the soldiers, take the risks, risk their blood and their treasure to go out and implement such a resolution.
Shashi Tharoor
#33. Many of the people who are most considered anti-American would love to partake of the American dream: the unspoken slogan of many protesters outside U.S. embassies abroad is really: 'Yankee go home, but take me with you.'
Shashi Tharoor
#35. No one says "Gee Whiz!" very much these days, of course, not even in America - both because that expression has long since been supplanted by others more colourful and less printable, and because our capacity for surprise has long since been dulled by a surfeit of sources.
Shashi Tharoor
#36. The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.
Shashi Tharoor
#38. There is not a thing as the wrong place, or the wrong time. We are where we are at the only time we have. Perhaps it's where we're meant to be.
Shashi Tharoor
#39. Though the euphoria surrounding Barack Obama's election last week as President-elect has not yet begun to subside, it is already time to recognise that the most important challenge facing the next U.S. president is to restore America's standing in the eyes of the world.
Shashi Tharoor
#40. The good terrorists are the guys who bomb and kill Indians. The bad terrorists are the ones who attack Pakistani interests, whether in Afghanistan or Pakistan. In other words, you blow up the Taj Mahal Hotel, you are a good guy. You blow up the Marriott in Islamabad, you are a bad guy.
Shashi Tharoor
#41. Malaysians talk with Mauritians, Arabs with Australians, South Africans with Sri Lankans, and Iranians with Indonesians. The Indian Ocean serves as both a sea separating them and a bridge linking them together.
Shashi Tharoor
#42. Five decades ago, as India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, began visibly ailing, the nation and the world were consumed by the question: 'After Nehru, who?' The inexpressible fear lay in the subtext to the question: 'After Nehru, what?'
Shashi Tharoor
#43. India's national elections are really an aggregate of thirty different state elections, each influenced by its own local considerations, regional political currents, and different patterns of political incumbency.
Shashi Tharoor
#44. Elections are an enduring spectacle of free India, and have provided foreign journalists with the opportunity to remind the world that India remains the world's largest democracy.
Shashi Tharoor
#45. minorityhood is a state of mind, Mr. Diggs. It is a sense of powerlessness, of being out of the mainstream, of being here on sufferance. I refuse to let others define me that way. I tell my fellow Muslims: No one can make you a minority without your consent.
Shashi Tharoor
#46. It's not the side of the bigger army that wins. It's the country that tells a better story.
Shashi Tharoor
#47. Hinduism as a faith might espouse tolerance, this does not necessarily mean that all Hindus behave tolerantly.
Shashi Tharoor
#48. Diplomacy is much like the "lovemaking of elephants", which is accompanied with a lot of bellowing and other sound effects, but no one can be sure of the consequences for at least the next two years
Shashi Tharoor
#49. Going abroad to study as a teenager, and joining the United Nations at 22, confirmed my ease with the world of the frequent flyer. I saw the average airport terminal as a familiar haven, like a friend's sitting room. But 9/11 changed all that.
Shashi Tharoor
#50. I returned to India after long years of international service, because I had always cherished the desire to make a difference in my own country.
Shashi Tharoor
#51. 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
#52. While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate.
Shashi Tharoor
#53. Great discoveries, Ganapathi, are often the result of making the wrong mistake at the right time.
Shashi Tharoor
#54. The Indian tricolour was raised just before sunset, and as it fluttered up the flagpole a late-monsoon rainbow emerged behind it, a glittering tribute from the heavens.
Shashi Tharoor
#55. India is more than a sum of its contradictions, any truism about India can be contradicted with another truism. There is no fixed stereotype. But even thinking about India makes clear the immensity of the nation-building challenge.
Shashi Tharoor
#56. If China wants to build a new six-lane expressway, it can bulldoze its way past any number of villages in its path; in India, if you want to widen a two-lane road, you could be tied up in court for a dozen years over compensation entitlements.
Shashi Tharoor
#57. They say every dog has its day, Ganapathi, but for this terrier twilight came before tea-time.
Shashi Tharoor
#58. The abrupt and sudden death of my wife has taken a severe emotional and psychic toll on me. On top of that, some people have stooped so low that they have tried to use my personal tragedy for their personal benefit.
Shashi Tharoor
#59. There's no longer a superpower standoff. But there are real problems that divide countries around the world. And the UN is still the place where we can get together and try and discuss them
Shashi Tharoor
#60. 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
#61. The fact that Nehru had risked his life to save a single Moslem had a profound effect far beyond New Delhi. Many thousands of Moslems who had intended to flee to Pakistan now stayed in India, staking their lives on Nehru's ability to protect them and assure them justice. In
Shashi Tharoor
#62. there is nothing restrictive or self-limiting about the Indian identity it reasserts: it is large, eclectic and flexible, containing multitudes. I
Shashi Tharoor
#63. 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
#64. Because so many voters happen to be illiterate, India invented the party symbol, so that voters who could not read the name of their candidate could vote for him or her anyway by recognizing the symbol under which they campaigned.
Shashi Tharoor
#65. What economic libralisation needs, if it is to succeed , is a general acceptance that reforms are for the general good, that they might seem to help some more than others, but that in the long run everyone will benefit from them. Such attitude is far from being realized
Shashi Tharoor
#66. Among the many international consequences of Barack Obama's stunning victory in the United States is worldwide introspection about whether such a breakthrough could happen elsewhere. Could a person of color win power in other white-majority countries?
Shashi Tharoor
#67. In India we celebrate the commonality of major differences; we are a land of belonging rather than of blood.
Shashi Tharoor
#68. Terrorism is a principal preoccupation in most of our international contacts.
Shashi Tharoor
#69. India has been born and reborn scores of times, and it will be reborn again. India is forever, and India is forever being made.
Shashi Tharoor
#70. Universality of the UN is a worthwhile thing in its own self because it means that every country belongs, feels it has a stake, and participates, rather than going away and finding other methods of conducting international relations.
Shashi Tharoor
#71. The Mahabharata declares, 'What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere.
Shashi Tharoor
#72. crushes the adventurous, the brave, the sensitive, and encourages the timid, the opportunist and time-serving, the sneak and the bully. It surrounds itself with
Shashi Tharoor
#73. My China Diary and Walking With Lions, were memoirs of his diplomatic and political experiences. The
Shashi Tharoor
#74. I am proud to represent the capital of Kerala, a state that in so many ways is a trailblazer for India's progress, though in other respects it seems to have been left behind in the race for 21st century development.
Shashi Tharoor
#75. If you believe in truth and cared enough to obtain it, you had to be prepared actively to suffer for it.
Shashi Tharoor
#76. The casting of 'Slumdog Millionaire' is a dream. Anil Kapoor, as the sleazy TV host, diamonds winking in his earlobes, has never been better; the quietly understated Irrfan Khan turns in another bravura performance as the police inspector whose questioning brings out Jamal's story.
Shashi Tharoor
#77. national television broadcast a fifty-two-episode serialization of the Mahabharata, the script was written by a Muslim poet, Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza.
Shashi Tharoor
#78. Indian democracy has often been likened to the stately progress of the elephant - ponderous in its gait and reluctant to change course, but not easily swayed from its new path when it does.
Shashi Tharoor
#79. A weak, insecure nation needs sporting heroes, players larger than life on the cricketing field, who can transcend the limitations of their country and team.
Shashi Tharoor
#80. Human beings, to me, are rather like electrical appliances that need to be charged regularly, and prayer is a way of plugging into that charge.
Shashi Tharoor
#82. Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals; there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. How dare a bunch of goondas shrink the soaring majesty of the Vedas and the Upanishads to the petty bigotry of their brand of identity politics?
Shashi Tharoor
#83. Education in India has made monumental progress since Independence but continues to face daunting challenges at multiple levels, particularly in terms of quality, infrastructure and dropout rates. We have islands of excellence floating in a sea of mediocrity.
Shashi Tharoor
#84. The principles he stood for and the way in which he asserted them were always easier to admire than to follow.
Shashi Tharoor
#86. The joke is that one Bengali is a poet, two Bengalis is an argument, three Bengalis is a political party,
Shashi Tharoor
#87. We've gone from the image of India as land of fakirs lying on beds of nails, and snake charmers with the Indian rope trick, to the image of India as a land of mathematical geniuses, computer wizards, software gurus.
Shashi Tharoor
#88. In writing of Indian culture, I am highly conscious of my own subjectivity; arguably, there is more than one Indian culture, and certainly more than one view of Indian culture.
Shashi Tharoor
#89. The closest Indian analogy to the position of black Americans is that of the Dalits - formerly called 'Untouchables,' the outcastes who for millennia suffered humiliating discrimination and oppression.
Shashi Tharoor
#90. Above all, Danny Boyle's 'Slumdog Millionaire' is the work of an artist at the peak of his powers. India is his palette, and Mumbai - that teeming 'maximum city', with 19 million strivers on the make, jostling, scheming, struggling and killing for success - is his brush.
Shashi Tharoor
#91. I don't go by my caste, creed or religion. My works speak for me.
Shashi Tharoor
#92. 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
#93. I'm not a techno-determinist. I believe we need to improve our existing human resources, and technology can only be a complement.
Shashi Tharoor
#94. I believe in an India of pluralism and diversity, not of religious bigotry and caste politics. I believe in an India that is secure in itself and confident of its place in the world, an India that is a proud example of tolerance, freedom and hope for the downtrodden.
Shashi Tharoor
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