He did not believe that any such transaction could be quoted from the annals of our political or Parliamentary history. It stood alone—he did not wish to use strong language, but he was going to say—it stood alone in its infamy.

Be independent of the good opinion of other people.

My intention was to trace, as far as I could, my own mental development and not write a survey of recent Indian history.

Nor let the critic, if he find the meaning of Camoens in some instances altered, imagine that he has found a blunder in the Translator. ... It was not to gratify the dull few, whose greatest pleasure in reading a translation is to see what the author exactly says; it was to give a poem that might live in the English language which was the ambition of the Translator. ... And the original is in the hands of the world.

I avow myself the partisan of truth alone.

He alone is an acute observer, who can observe minutely without being observed.

I don’t rely on any sources other than my own compatriots.

Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him.

However, there is one great temptation and that is that you can forget that the aim of the writer was to reject all other worlds and to construct one of his own and that the aim of the translator is to re-embody himself into the world of the various writers.

India is my country, and in that sense my outrage is personal. But I seek nothing from history — only an account of itself.

For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.

An expert gives an objective view. He gives his own view.

I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me
whether what I have thought has already been
thought before me by another.

My endeavour has been to render the sense of my author as nearly as possible, which could never be done merely by translating his words.