Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse. So we are forced to accept democracy. It has good points and also bad. But merely sayi… - Jawaharlal Nehru

The ideals and objectives of yesterday was still ideals of today, but they lost some of their luster and even, as one seemed to go towards them, they lost the shining beauty which had warmed the heart and vitalized the body. Evil triumphed often enough, but what was far worse was the coarsening and distortion of what seemed so right. Was human nature so essentially bad that it would take ages of training ,through suffering and misfortune, before it could behave reasonably and raise man above the creature of lust and violence and deceit that he now was? And, meanwhile , was every effort to change radically in the present or the near future doomed to failure

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

Held a ‘prisoner perforce inactive when a fierce activity consumes the world’, Nehru found the present had acquired the ‘immobility and unchangeableness’ of the past. Still, sequestered from the world, he felt ‘the domination of the present’ — or to use a more current phrase, the urgency of now pressed in on him. Denied the freedom to act in this present, he turned to the past and made it his instrument for acting on the future.