Gandhi: Where there's injustice, I always believed in fighting. The question is, do you fight to change things or to punish? For myself, I've found we're all such sinners, we should leave punishment to God. And if we really want to change things, there are better things than derailing trains or slashing someone with a sword.
Gandhi: The function of a civil resistance is to provoke response and we will continue to provoke until they respond or change the law. They are not in control; we are.
[first lines]
Title Card: No man's life can be encompassed in one telling. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight, to include each event, each person who helped to shape a lifetime. What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record and try to find one's way to the heart of the man...
Gandhi: No Indian must be treated as the English treat us. We must remove untouchability from our hearts and from our lives.
Gandhi: [in South Africa] You mean you can appoint Mr. Baker as your attorney but you can't walk down the street with him?
Kahn: Well, I can, but I risk being kicked into the gutter by someone less holy than Mr. Baker.
Judge Broomfield: [At Gandhi's 1922 trial] It is impossible for me to ignore that you're in a different category from any person I have tried or am likely ever to try. Nevertheless, it is my duty to sentence you to six years in prison. If however His Majesty's government should at a later date see fit to reduce the term... no one will be better pleased than I.
Margaret Bourke-White: Do you really believe you could use non-violence against someone like Hitler?
Gandhi: [thinks] Not without defeats, and great pain. But are there no defeats in war? No pain? What you cannot do is accept injustice. From Hitler, or anyone. You must make the injustice visible, and be prepared to die like a soldier to do so.
Gandhi: I, for one, have never advocated passive anything. We must never sumbit to such laws. And I think our resistance must be *active* and provocative!
Kasturba Gandhi: I say with Gandhiji: There is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness.
Gandhi: I have friends who keep telling me how much it costs them to keep me in poverty.
Margaret Bourke-White: [to Gandhi] You're the only man I know who makes his own clothes.
Colonel: [moments before the Amritsar Massacre] Should we issue a warning, sir?
Gen. Dyer: They've had their warning. No meetings.
[pause]
Gen. Dyer: *Fire!*
Gandhi: I've traveled so far. And all I've done is come back... home.
Vince Walker: Now, wait a minute. You know what you're going to do, don't you?
Gandhi: It would have been very uncivil of me to let you make such a long trip for nothing!
[walks off]
