26 quotes found
"Europe is only powerful; India is beautiful."
"Europe is organized, marvellously organized; but India is cultivated."
"The Hindu religion in its popular expression, as one can see it, is in sum the pre-Byzantine Greek religion, and all the ancient Aryan religions of Europe, minus the tribal spirit and, generally, plus the goodness and the respect for all beings."
"The Hindu Aryas are, among the modern peoples of similar race and language, the only great people to have conserved a living Aryan religion. That is their most beautiful entitlement to glory, the secret of their strength and pride, even in the midst of all their misery the secret of their freedom under all the past and future phases of foreign domination."
"The day when the whole of India will break its idols and worship God after his fashion, that day he will be Indian, like the Afghan across the mountains is an Afghan... but until then, he will remain in India a conqueror who remembers his old victories, the master of India cheated of his prey by the late-coming British, whom he accuses, in spite of the benefits they heap upon him, of favouring the Hindus.... The Indian Christian is a Hindu unaware of himself."
"Hinduism is really superior to other religions, not for its spirituality, but for that still more precious thing it gives to its followers: a scientific outlook on religion and on life. Hindu spirituality is a consequence of that very outlook. We consider it useless to oppose: India to the “West,” as “spiritualistic” opposed to “materialistic.” Hindu superiority lies elsewhere; not in the opposition of Hindu thought to European thought, but in the fact of its greater consistency than that of European thought, of its greater faithfulness to life, of greater harmony between life and it; in the universality of the Hindu’s scientific outlook, compared to that of the Europeans."
"Long centuries before any foreigner had settled in India, the unity of the country was materialised in symbols. What more suggestive story than that, for instance, of Sati, Siva’s wife, whose body, divided, after her death, in fifty-one pieces, is lying still in fifty-one different places, therefore revered as “tirthasthans,” throughout the Indian Peninsula? One lies near Peshawar, one in Kamakhya, not far from India’s eastern boundaries; one in Benares, one in the very extreme South, others here and there. Fifty-one pieces, but one body; fifty-one “tirthasthans” in the name of the same Goddess, scattered over the same territory. Indeed, among the different interpretations that can be given of the legend of Sati, one can take it in this light: Sati is India herself, personified; India’s soil, sacred from end to end, is, with all its variety, the actual body of one great Goddess... And Indian nationalism means: devotion to this great Goddess."
"I worship impersonal Nature, which is neither "good" or "bad", and who knows neither love nor hatred. I worship Life; the Sun, Sustainer of life. I believe in the Law of everlasting struggle, which is the law of life, and in the duty of the best specimens of our race — the natural élite of mankind — to rule the earth, and evolve out of themselves a caste of supermen, a people 'like unto the Gods'."
"To those privileged ones -- among whom we count ourselves -- the high-resounding "isms" to which their contemporaries ask them to give their allegiance are all equally futile: bound to be betrayed, defeated, and finally rejected by men at large, if containing anything really noble; bound to enjoy, for the time being, some sort of noisy success, if sufficiently vulgar, pretentious, and soul-killing to appeal to the growing number of mechanically conditioned slaves that crawl about our planet, posing as free men; all destined to prove, ultimately, of no avail."
"A 'civilization' that makes such a ridiculous fuss about alleged 'war crimes' -- acts of violence against the actual or potential enemies of one's cause -- and tolerates slaughterhouses and vivisection laboratories, and circuses and the fur industry (infliction of pain upon creatures that can never be for or against any cause), does not deserve to live. Out with it! Blessed the day it will destroy itself, so that a healthy, hard, frank and brave, nature-loving and truth-loving élite of supermen with a life-centered faith,-- a natural human aristocracy, as beautiful, on its own higher level, as the four-legged kings of the jungle -- might again rise, and rule upon its ruins, for ever!"
"In the Third Reich, even schoolchildren knew from their textbooks that this [= the Aryan] race had spread from the north to the south and east, and not the other way around."
"I asked Savitri ... how she would have received her mother. Without batting an eyelid, she said: 'I would have shot her.'"
"For the period from her birth until after World War 2, we have to trust Savitri Devi Mukherji for her life story. However, it is obvious that she herself has arranged her biography a posteriori in order to harmonize it with the themes defended in her books... It is evident and very clear that Savitri Devi Mukherji has 'arranged' her biography in order to construct herself a persona apt to shine in the tiny circle of neo-Nazism."
"Savitri Devi's paganism was a very modern philosophy of submersion in the purely physical, a biological materialism exalted to the status of a religion. Obviously, genuine Pagan philosophers with their own views of the transcendent dimension would hardly have recognized their own worldview in this reductionist quasi-Darwinism."
"The Aryan Invasion Theory, along with the concomitant racialist understanding of the caste system as a kind of Apartheid system to preserve the Aryan's racial purity, was the alpha and omega of Savitri Devi's own worldview."
"As for the Nazi connection, let us at any rate be clear about an easily verifiable fact: in so far as the Nazis cared about Indian history, they favoured the AIT. ... In fact, after reading her autobiography, “Memories and Reflexions of an Aryan Lady”, there is not the slightest doubt left that for her and her husband, their belief in the AIT, along with their distortive reinterpretation of Hindu tradition in terms of the AIT, was the direct cause of their enthusiasm for Hitler."
"[Perhaps] she developed her crassly racist views of inter-caste relations only later, projecting them back onto her Hindu activist period when she wrote her autobiography thirty-five years after the fact. My impression is that in the 1930s, she was much more moderate in this respect."
"The greatest fighter after Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess and Joseph Goebbels. Moreover she was the first to discover the secret and spiritual power behind Hitlerism."
"I never point a finger. If we reach people's brains and hearts and we try to come up with ideas, we can help them go in a direction which will solve a lot of the problems we've created. And you know, then again, whether it's in government or industries, these people have families and they care. They want to do the right thing, but we need to help. And thanks to science and new technologies, we can make that happen."
"Too often people think education is boring. Well, it’s not boring! And particularly, if you have people who can communicate with you and also, sometimes, information that experts can provide you. That’s why I always go with biologists or people who can educate me. I want to be educated all the time."
"Everybody needs to understand when you drink a glass of water you’re drinking the ocean. There’s only one water system. If you go up in the Alps or wherever on top of the mountains to go skiing, you’re skiing on the ocean. That water system is life for every plant, every animal, and we need to manage it like a business. We need to make sure it’s not polluted and we need to stop using the ocean ultimately as a universal sewer."
"Jean-Michel Cousteau said he thinks whales are like a living, breathing planet–each one. I love that he said that. I’d thought he’d be a great photographer and a good guy, but he’s also very poetic in how he sees the world"
"This is an inheritance for the future, and what better way to get people interested and understanding that than getting them involved. The key elements are education, empowerment, and restoration. Education: getting people to connect with the ocean, to understand why it's important, why they should care, whether they're on the oceanside or not. Empowerment: saying, you can make a difference, and come with us, let's go do it together. And of course the restoration aspect is the payoff."
"Nothing is impossible. We need to dream, we need to be creative, and we all need to have an adventure in order to create miracles in the darkest of times. And whether it's about climate change or eradicating poverty or giving back to future generations what we've taken for granted, it's about adventure. And who knows, maybe there will be underwater cities, and maybe some of you will become the future aquanauts."
"If we want to give back to future generations what we have taken for granted, we have to understand the planet as a natural resource bank account. In other words, we need to start investing in depleted capital and live off the interest instead. There are plenty of individuals from both countries who are conscious of these things and trying to do better. But, we need to do much better as a global society. All countries need to communicate the importance of this life support system and protect this web of life. We must be able to live with the planet and not on it."
"The environment men create through their wants becomes a mirror that reflects their civilization; more importantly it also constitutes a book in which is written the formula of life that they communicate to others and transmit to succeeding generations. The characteristics of the environment are therefore of importance not only because they affect the comfort and quality of present-day life, but even more because they condition the development of young people and thereby of society."