People From Mumbai

"It's been 20 years since I started playing tennis and I've spent a decade playing singles and doubles professionally. I still enjoy singles and may play in an occasional tournament or at the Fed Cup if my country needs me. But I think the time has now come for me to completely shift my focus onto doubles."

"She was conferred with the prestigious Padma Shri award for her contribution to tennis on the eve [25 January 2006] of the Republic Day."

"She is the highest ranked female tennis player ever from India, with a career high ranking of 27 in singles and 7 in doubles. She knows from her early experiences about the hardships that tennis players from India have to endure in order to become a successful professional. She had a long cherished vision for Tennis in India. The Vision - "To pave a way for Indian Tennis by training and promoting urban and rural talent and to enable our players to make a significant mark in the world of international tennis.""

"All I want to do is play."

"Well, I'm not a yoga person. I've been told to try yoga. I just can't get myself to do yoga. I pray four or five times a day so it's about 10 minutes of total concentration... Also because when you're trying to focus only on God, you're trying to get everything else out of your head and just have that single focus. Trust me, it's very hard to do that four or five times a day. I mean, it's hard enough to do it once a day, but four or five times a day to just switch off the world and focus everything on God is difficult to do, and I do try to do that. I think that's one of the reasons yoga is not part of my routine and I feel this is better because I am actually being constructive, but in yoga I'm just going blank."

"Six-year-old girls in a place like Hyderabad did not play; tennis was a recreation like badminton or gardening. So I draw inspiration from my parents. Steffi Graf has always been my tennis idol; always Steffi Graf. Just the way she was and the way she carried herself on the court and off the court. She does inspire me today. Everyone asks me "Who is your favorite tennis player?" And I always say "Steffi Graf." I just cannot imagine anyone being better than her, you know? I think a lot of people love Steffi Graf for the way she was on and off the court."

"Whether it is tennis or any other sport, the situation for women now is far better than it was 10 years ago when I had started playing. Now, people support and promote their daughters to play and take up sports as their career. It wasn't the case during my time. I am glad that things are looking better for girls. Taking a step in this direction, I too have opened my training academy in Hyderabad. Sport for girls in India is in great shape now."

"Indian doubles tennis ace Sania Mirza recently achieved a career-best rank of number five in the world when the new Women’s Tennis Association doubles chart was released after the Wimbledon Championships concluded in July 2014."

"Negativity sells. I have been labelled a rebel. If I had been one, would I have got married at 23? Would I have been a straight student?"

"On the tennis court, one needs a cool temperament, tremendous ball sense, reflexes, speed, hand-eye co-ordination, power, timing and peak physical fitness. Off the court, the player and support team need skills in planning, execution, travel, an ability to raise funds when needed, and several other talents."

"She is the pride of Hyderabad and hoped she would soon become No 1 player from her fifth position. The government would extend all support to provide her best training and other facilities."

"A couple of weeks ago, the 21-year-old was photographed with her feet up while watching a colleague playing in an international exhibition match in Perth, and the proximity of her toes to a nearby Indian flag raised temperatures in her home state to vindaloo levels."

"You can either agree with me, or be wrong."

"I'm not a part of the glamour industry. I would like to focus on my game, and there are minimal chances of me getting into films."

"One win and you’re on top of the world. Lose in the first round of the next tournament; you’re back to reality."

"I think people tend to forget that as celebrities we are still human. We have the same emotions - we cry, we have fun, we laugh, we get sad, and we get hurt. When something is written about you, which millions of people are reading, and it is not true, imagine how hurtful it can be."

"The most difficult element is perhaps the lack of privacy in my life."

"I don't think I have made any deliberate or conscious attempt to represent the new generation. I am what I am."

"Yes, I'm a practising Muslim, but I don't understand why only I'm asked about my religion. Everyone's got a religion out there. I wonder why no one else is asked about it."

"The honour and respect that a country earns by being represented at mega-sporting events like the Grand Slams has to be seen to be believed, experienced to be fully understood."

"When a woman wants to do something on her own way, she is criticized, dubbed as a rebel. I (too) was stated an arrogant. However, I stuck to my guns and today I am at this place. We have to fight in order to move forward in this men's world."

"As I came to the lime light, the media asked me many questions. A lot many moral policing... 'Wear this, wear that, why a T-shirt?' Everybody has the right to form their opinions, and I have the right to ignore them."

"The media is only concerned with trying to sell themselves through concocted sensationalism. I try to avoid them and rarely read their concocted stories."

"A High Court lawyer filed a case for her arrest (without bail) and a three-year jail sentence... [case] under something called the "Prevention Of Insult To The National Honour Act", citing "disrespect" to the national flag. India's predilection for red tape, taught to them by the Imperial British, but since refined to gargantuan levels, means that by the time the case gets to court she will probably be a grandmother, but it's a bit of worry nonetheless. When Sania, who is Shia Muslim, first bared her thighs on a tennis court, people took to the streets to burn effigies of her, although this in itself is such a common event in India that it more or less doubles the smog levels."

"Well, I've grown up on the tennis circuit which has friendships with people from diverse religions, races, backgrounds and scores of different countries across the globe. I think this experience broadened my horizons. I can comfortably embrace relationships on a personal level while looking beyond narrow constraints."

"When she first started out on the pro circuit at the age of 18, the length of her skirts prompted some religious mullah to issue a fatwa, which was a bit of a handicap to her chosen profession given that fashion in women's tennis apparel has moved on, not to mention up, since Suzanne Lenglen's knickers were covered by several petticoats and a skirt which picked up chalk from the baseline."

"Playing for the country is an honour. The ultimate honour, in fact. If you want to look at it as pressure, you will find it very difficult to cope with the expectations of a billion people. I look at it as an opportunity, as being among the few who have been given this opportunity to make the country proud."

"Clothing is my personal thing. Every time I get dressed, I fear that it will be the next three days' wear"

"The facilities at that point in India were not up to international standards and the lack of tennis culture did make things more difficult."

"As he thought about these problems, Hitler’s attention was turned to America. Hitler didn’t know a lot about America. He had never been to America. And he despised America. ‘My feeling against Americanism,’ he later said in 1942, ‘are feeling of hatred and deep repugnance.’ Why? He claimed, ’Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized and the other half negrified.’ Moreover, America is ‘a country where everything is built on the dollar.’ For Hitler, America represented the worst case of unrestricted Jewish capitalism"

"FDR Franklin D. Roosevelt cozied up to and made deals with the worst racists in America… FDR appointed Hugo Black, a former Ku Klux Klansman, to the Supreme Court. Black was completely unqualified—his only judicial experience had been eighteen months as a municipal court judge—but he had a reputation as an enthusiastic New Dealer who had publicly endorsed FDR’s court-packing plan. Black was also an active Klan member who had spoken at and led Klan rallies and marches throughout his native Alabama."

"FDR also supported racist Democrats in Congress in their efforts to thwart anti-lynching laws. This was a key condition the racists put before FDR. They said they would not support FDR’s New Deal programs unless FDR supported their effort to block Republican anti-lynching bills. So FDR convinced even northern Democrats and progressives to back their southern counterparts in keeping these bills from coming to the floor for a vote. This is one of the most disgraceful legacies of the FDR presidency and it goes virtually unmentioned in progressive FDR biographies."

"The fascists adopted an economic policy that is closely parallel to, and in many respects identical with, today’s progressivism. Mussolini called this policy ‘corporatism,’ but a more descriptive term would be state-run capitalism. Mussolini envisioned a powerful centralized state directing the institutions of the private sector, forcing their private welfare into line with the national welfare… Although today’s American Left dares not invoke Mussolini’s name, the honest among them will have to admit that it was he and his fellow fascists who were their pioneers and paved their way."

"One might naively expect the Left, then, to embrace and celebrate Gentile. This, of course, will never happen. The Left has the desperate need to conceal fascism’s association with contemporary leftism. Even when the Left uses Gentilean rhetoric, it’s source can never be publicly acknowledged. And since the Left dominates academia and popular culture, it has the clout to perform this vanishing trick. That’s why the progressives intend to keep Gentile where they’ve got him: dead, buried, and forgotten."

"If you read the Nazi platform without knowing its source, you could easily be forgiven for thinking you were reading the 2016 platform of the Democratic Party. Or at least a Democratic platform drafted jointly by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Sure, some of the language is out of date. The Democrats can’t talk about ‘usury’ these days; they’d have to substitute ‘Wall Street greed.’ But otherwise, it’s all there. All you have to do is cross out the word ‘Nazi’ and write in the word ‘Democrat.’"

"Capitalism works not through coercion or conquest, but through the consent of the consumer."

"The Obama administration tried to shut me up."

"By limiting state power, conservatives seek among other things to protect the right of the people to keep the fruit of their own labor. Abraham Lincoln, America’s first Republican president, placed himself squarely in the founding tradition when he said, ‘I always thought the man who made the corn should eat the corn.’ Lincoln, like the founders, was not concerned that private property or private earnings might cause economic inequality. Rather, he believed, as three of the founders themselves wrote in the Federalist Papers No. 10, that ‘the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property’ is the ‘first object of government.’"

"Slavery existed all over the world. The Egyptians had slaves. The Chinese had slaves. The Africans did. American Indians had slaves long before Columbus. And tragically, slavery continues today in many countries. What's uniquely Western is the abolition of slavery. And what's uniquely American is the fighting of a great war to end it."

"The first time, we did not know what change would look like. Now we do. The first time, we did not know Barack Obama. Now we do. Which dream will we carry into 2016? The American dream or Obama's dream? The future is not in my hands. It's not even in Obama's hands. The future is in your hands."

"Imagine the unimaginable... What would the world look like if America did not exist?"

"Gentile was, in fact, a lifelong socialist. Like Marx, he viewed socialism as the sine qua non of social justice, the ultimate formula for everyone paying their ‘fair share.’ For Gentile, fascism is nothing more than a modified form of socialism, a socialism arising not merely from material deprivation but also from an aroused national consciousness, a socialism that unites rather than divides communities."

"Did America steal the country from the Native Americans? Much of this critique focuses on Columbus and the actions of the Spanish conquistadors. But Columbus never even landed in America. And the actions of the Spanish, that was 150 years before America."

"If we think of the Titanic as symbolizing the American era, Obama wants that ship to go down. Obama is the architect of American decline, and progressivism is the ideology of American suicide."

"This is our turn at the wheel, and history will judge us based on how we handle it. Decline is a choice, but so is liberty."

"My podium is a little narrow, but I guess that's okay since I remembered to wear pants."

"The Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians, and the Russians are all getting richer and stronger due to wealth creation. Yet the leaders of these countries, while they appreciate wealth creation as one way to gain power, have never given up on the conquest ethic as another way to gain power. In fact, they see wealth creation as away to increase their military power; then that power can be deployed to acquire more wealth through conquest. [Americans] no longer have the conquest ethic. But the Chinese do; they have never given it up. This is why the world still needs America. We remain the custodians of the idea that wealth should be obtained through invention and trade, not through forced seizure."

"Dan has raised so many points... I feel a bit like the mosquito at the nudist colony—I'm just not sure where to begin!"

"Here's the formula for Obama's success: "They work, and you eat.""

"Gentile also perceived fascism emerging out of revolutionary struggle, what the media today terms ‘protest’ or ‘activism.’ Unlike Marx, he conceived the struggle not between the working class and the capitalists, but between the selfish individual trying to live for himself and the fully actualized individual who willingly puts himself at the behest of society and the state. Gentile seems to be the unacknowledged ancestor of the street activism of Antifa and other leftist groups. ‘One of the major virtues of fascism,’ he writes, ‘is that it obliged those who watched from their windows to come down into the street.’"