B. R. Ambedkar Quotes on Politics
B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936), the long sequence of writings on the Indian Constitution he chaired the drafting of, and the late The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957) gave twentieth-century Indian political philosophy its most uncompromising Dalit critique of the caste order and the constructive defense of constitutional democracy as its remedy. The central commitments — that caste cannot be reformed within the religious framework of Hinduism that constitutes it, that political democracy is unstable without the social democracy of substantive equality among citizens, and that the resources of the Buddhist tradition supply the principal indigenous philosophical alternative to the caste order — drove Ambedkar’s lifelong political work and his late conversion to Buddhism along with hundreds of thousands of his followers in 1956. The framework shaped the post-independence Indian republic through the Constitution and remains the principal philosophical statement of Dalit political thought.
Quotes
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“I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.”
As quoted in The Ultimate Book of Quotations by Joseph Demakis, p. 415 -
“Caste is not a division of labour; it is a division of labourers.”
As quoted in The Annihilation of Caste -
Attributed to B. R. Ambedkar:
“Educate, agitate, organize.”
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Attributed to B. R. Ambedkar:
“Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment; it has to be cultivated.”
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“Religion is for man, not man for religion.”
Why I like Buddhism and how it is useful to the world in its present circumstances", BBC (May 1956). As quoted in "Why Dr. Ambedkar renounced Hinduism? -
Attributed to B. R. Ambedkar:
“Justice has always evoked ideas of equality, of proportion, of compensation.”
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“It is an incontrovertible fact that Christianity was not enough to end the slavery of the Negroes in the United States . A civil war was necessary to give the Negro the freedom which was denied to him by the Christians. The dependence of those in charge of Christian endeavour to make the parties move on? A consideration of this question will enable us to understand why Christianity has failed to raise the status of the untouchable convert.”
On Christianity in Essays on Untouchables and Untouchability: Religious .