Zakir Husain Quotes

Education should be able to distinguish between the heritage that helps and that heritage hampers the tradition that undermines and the tradition that fortifies.

I have after years of thinking on the subject come to the conviction that work is the only instrument of effective education. It may sometimes be manual work and sometimes non-manual work. Although it is work alone that can educate, I have also come to the conviction by long observation and experience that all work does not educate.

The scientists and technologists must keep in mind social welfare. Education thus should develop the totality of the child. Indian education is lacking in the following major drawbacks.
(1) Indian education has been like stagnant water for quite some time.
(2)Indian education ignores new ideas and fresh thinking in educational matters.

Education is the master and politics is its servant. It is necessary to combine power with morality as well as with science and technology

I maintain that education is a prime instrument of national purpose and that the quality of its education is inseparably involved in the quality of the nation.

Humanities and science are not something mutually contradictory but complimentary. One should realize the fact that science is devoid of values especially moral and ethical values. Science is a system of philosophy without ethics. Science devoid of ethical judgment becomes an ally of everyone – of the good as well as the bad and is of service in changing the world into a paradise or reducing it to a veritable hell.

Feeble beliefs must be replaced by healthier habits and irrelevant institutions by progressive institutions. Our will should get guidance not form the twilight of the intellect but from the broad daylight of true beliefs.

Something deep down in me seems to furnish me with the belief that Providence has destined India to be the laboratory in which the greatest experiment of cultural synthesis will be undertaken and successfully completed. India’s mission in the world history seems to be evolution of a distinct type of humanity, combining and harmonizing in itself lives of the diverse types which history has produced, all blended together to form a new type that might evolve a characteristic and, perhaps, more satisfactory patterns of civilized existence than those in vogue at present.

To seek to exclude any of these because of age or association with some particular elements of our national being would almost be an act of treason. In the rich history of our country nothing is good or bad because it is new or old...Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian or Parsi.

Home expands it becomes the country. It grows to be India that become the Himalayas and the Vindyachal, the Ganges... the Cauvery; it becomes Rameshwaram... it grows to be W:Rama:Rama and Lakshmana, the Buddha and the Shankaracharya, Mouniddin Ajmeri and Jalaluddin Akbar; it becomes Nanak and Kabir, Surdas, Tukaram, and Mirabai; it becomes Kalidas and Tulsidas; it becomes Mir, Ghalib and Anis; it becomes Vallathol and Tagore; it becomes Gandhi and Abul Kalam, Vinoba and Nehru.

Streams of ideals that originated in the summit of our past, flowing underground in the depth of India’s soul, the ideals of simplicity of life, clarity of spiritual vision, purity of heart, harmony with the universe and consciousness of the infinite personality in all creation and the urge to bring these to the surface of our daily use and purification.

Placed under the sway of conflicting urges of the Indian masses we are yet given the poetic quality of composing a harmonious life. There are thousand stands of culture that make of the cultural life of our people a variegated pattern of exquisite beauty and richness.

Life is immense, comprehensive and dynamic. It includes spirit and matter and idealism and pragmatism and rotates round the axis of the noble and the ignoble. Life strives for higher ends. It is a mission, a service, and finally worship.

Our sweat is the answer to all our problems, and that the tiller, the artisan and the teacher are the three agents who feed the body, mind and soul.

Our country does not need warm blood oozing out from our necks, but it needs the sweat of our brow that would flow twelve months in a year. The need is great for work, serious work. Our future would be made or marred by the broken hut of the farmer, by the dark roof of the artisan, and by the straw school of a village. It is possible to settle the disputes of a day or two in political strife, in conferences and congresses, but those places which I have indicated have been centuries the centers of our destiny. Work in these areas requires patience and perseverance. It tires you much and it is thankless too. It does not yield quick results; but yes, if someone holds on for long, it would give him sweet fruit.