147 Quotes by Shashi Tharoor

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.

One of the more difficult questions I used to find myself being asked as a United Nations official, especially when I had been addressing a generalist audience, was: What is the single most important thing that can be done to improve the world?...If I had to pick one thing we must do above all else, I now offer a two-word mantra: "Educate girls.

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

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.

flaunting the Kohinoor on the Queen Mother’s crown in the Tower of London is a powerful reminder of the injustices perpetrated by the former imperial power. Until it is returned—at least as a symbolic gesture of expiation—it will remain evidence of the loot, plunder and misappropriation that colonialism was really all about. Perhaps that is the best argument for leaving the Kohinoor where it emphatically does not belong—in British hands.

Human beings don't live in the long run they live and suffer in the here and now

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.

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.

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.