Listen to the people on the ground. They have all the solutions in the world.

Strengthen the rural areas and you will find less people migrating to urban areas. You give them opportunity, self respect & self confidence, they will never go to an urban slum.

[The Barefoot College is] the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher.

Our job is to show how it is possible to take an illiterate woman and make her into an engineer in six months and show that she can solar-electrify a village.

What's the best way of communicating in the world today? Television? No. Telegraph? No. Telephone? No. Tell a woman.

I had a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education in India, and that almost destroyed me.

The prime minister is 12 years old. She looks after 20 goats in the morning, but she's prime minister in the evening.

School is something that you learn - reading and writing. Education is what you learn from the family, from the environment, from the community.

Some minds improve by travel, others, rather, resemble copper wire, or brass, which get the narrower by going farther.

The mind is fast emancipating itself from the dominion of man and of matter. It has let loose fearful forces on the world.

One's life, from being an exterior thing, grows inwards. Its intensity stays the same; and, d'you know, it's most mysterious, the corners in which the joy of living can sometimes hide away.

Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.

There is a rollicking kindness that looks like malice.

If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.

I look up the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous. Then, my hands shaking, I open the bar and drink the leftover whiskey, gin and vermouth-whatever I can lay my shaking hands on.

People think there's a rigid class system here, but dukes have been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans.

The little money I have - that is my wealth, but the things I have for which I would not take money, that is my treasure.

You may have taken the planet, but you will lose this game!