Important Quotations for UPSC Essay Paper

Importance of Quotes for UPSC Essay Writing

Relevant quotations, though not necessary, always improve the quality of your Essay if used appropriately. It also tells the examiner that you have grasped the core idea of the Essay Topic. Having said that, we often forcefully use the quotations which becomes counter-productive. Sometimes we feel that we have memorized them with so much difficulty and hence if we do not use them, it would be huge waste of effort.

So Quotations for UPSC Essay are like ammunition that you need to keep in your back-pocket but use only when it is appropriate. I had made a list of quotations for the Essay Paper just a couple of days before the exam day and memorized them. Here is the list of UPSC Essay Quotations the I had prepared.

You can also download quotes for UPSC essay pdf format. Link for PDF download is given at the bottom.

Quotations on Education

1. “Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” Nelson Mandela
2. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” Mahatma Gandhi
3. “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” Margaret Mead
4. “I have never let my schooling interfere with my Education.” Mark Twain
5. “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learnt in school.” Einstein
6. “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Aristotle
7. “Education is the manifestation of perfection already in man.” Swami Vivekananda

Quotations on Science and Religion

1. “All thinking men are atheists.” Ernst Hemingway 
2. “Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind…” Issac Newton
3. “The notion that Science and Spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” Carl Sagan
4. “Science without Religion is lame and Religion without Science is blind” Einstein
5. “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” Christopher Hitchens

Quotes on Democracy

1. “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Churchill
2. “The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so much dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy” Montesquieu
3. “The ballot is stronger than the bullet.” Abraham Lincoln
4. “There cannot be daily democracy without daily citizenship.” Ralph Nader
5. ” I understand democracy as something that gives the weak the same chance as the strong.” Mahatma Gandhi
6. “Democracy is not law of the majority but protection of the minority.” Albert Camus
7. “In a democracy, the individual enjoys not only the ultimate power, but carries the ultimate responsibility.” Norman Cousins

Quotes on Materialism/Consumerism

1. “A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.” Confucius
2. “To live fully, we must use things and love people, not love things and use people.” Powell John
3. “The world has enough for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed.” Mahatma Gandhi
4. “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there would be peace.” John Lennon

Quotations on Peace/Justice

1. “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” William Gladstone
2. “Peace and Justice are two sides of the same coin.” Eisenhower
3. “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” Mahatma Gandhi

Quotes by Mahatma Gandhi

1. “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
2. “Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.”
3. “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”
4. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”
5. “Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment. Full effort is full victory.”
6. “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from indomitable will.”
7. “The good man is the friend of all living things.”
8. “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.”
9. “The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
10. “I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.”
11. “There are people in the world, so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
12. “Violent means will give violent freedom.”
13. “There is higher courts than courts of justice and that is conscience.”
14. “To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonesty.”
15. “A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.”

Quotes on Women Empowerment

1. “If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman” Margaret Thatcher
2. “There is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women.” Kofi Annan
3. “Educate a man and you educate an individual. Educate a woman and you educate a family.” A. Cripps
4. “I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.” William Golding
5. “If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.” Plato
6. “Women are the largest untapped reservoir of talent in the world.” Hillary Clinton
7. “There is no hope for that family or country where there is no estimation of women, where they live in sadness. For this reason, they have to be raised first.” Swami Vivekananda

Quotes on Freedom of Speech, Liberty

1. “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” Soren Kierkegaard
2. “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Benjamin Franklin
3. “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” George Orwell
4. “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” George B. Shaw
5. “When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.” Thomas Jefferson

By no means this is any exhaustive list. But I also need to tell you two things. One is that I could use 3 quotations from this list in the first essay. Second, I didn’t use any quote for the second essay.

READ: Sample Essay Written by IAS Topper (Score:164)