Swami Vivekananda Quotes

The West remains obsessed by the caste system.

Most modern Indians don't stick to their caste jobs any more. There is more inter-caste marriage, more fluidity, more freedom than ever before. But the outcastes are usually still outcastes, because they are still the ones who tan India's animals, burn its dead, and remove its excrement.

Many characters in the novel are representative of types that exist in India. He represents the caste system in India with an air of superiority, the caste system in India and the people thinking that western things are better.

I am from a very vague caste. I don't belong to any of the four. I am kayastha. They are well read, largely clerks so they get treated respectfully.

When one English person speaks, another one immediately classifies him. No class system in the world is so audible, which is also why it is so pernicious and enduring.

Dalits are our brothers, but some of us do not embrace them like brothers. But when they go away and become Christians, some of us take pride in associating with them. This should stop.

Untouchability is a hydra-headed monster.

Hinduism has sinned in giving sanction to untouchability.

Indian leaders are saying, "You don't understand our caste system. It's really a lovely thing. People are very happy about it and so on." I don't think that's quite fair.

You have countries like India that have tried to help untouchables, with essentially affirmative-action programs, but it hasn't fundamentally changed the structure of their societies.

You grow up Latin in this country and you're a third class citizen from the word go, and so you have to deal with everything around you from that point of view and trying to feel entitled.

If untouchability is an integral part of Hinduism, the latter is a spent bullet.

I don't like a class system. I don't like the idea of being in a different class than other people.

A Sudra [lowest caste untouchable], though emancipated by his master, is not released from servitude; since that is innate in him, who can set him free from it?

A Brahmana shall be compelled to pay a fine of one thousand panas if he has intercourse with … females of those two lower castes; for offending with a … Sudra female a fine of one thousand.

In a superior civilization, as, for example, that of the Indo-Aryans, the being who is without a characteristic form or caste... would emerge as a pariah. In this respect America is a society of pariahs. There is a role for pariahs. It is to be subjected to beings whose form and internal laws are precisely defined. Instead the modern pariahs seek to become dominant themselves and to exercise their dominion over all the world.

I was also pained to notice an institution which I certainly did not expect to find in this country – I mean caste. Your rich people are really Brahmins, and your poor people are Sudras.

In India, cast not class … is what counts most in popular life.

Nothing can be more repugnant to the individualism and love of freedom of the British race than the Hindu caste system, under which every man is born into a particular water-tight compartment from which he cannot emerge except through death and rebirth …

The idea of the nation [India] itself is incompatible with the institution of caste.

That the caste system must be abolished if the Hindu society is to be reconstructed on the basis of equality, goes without saying. Untouchability has its roots in the caste system. They cannot expect the Brahmins to rise in revolt against the caste system. Also we cannot rely upon the non-Brahmins and ask them to fight our battle.

Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire which prevents the Hindus from co-mingling and which has, therefore, to be pulled down. Caste is a notion; it is a state of the mind.

We can't deny the existence of caste in India. We have to live with it.

In fact, the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black Americans, have consistently occupied lower rungs in the American social hierarchy.

I have dark skin. My nickname is El Negro. They call me El Negro in Mexico because even in my country, the dark skin is evidence of Indian blood, a sign that one technically belongs to a third class. Even my grandmother had some kind of differentiation with me, because I was darker than my siblings.