His Words
12 quotations, in the order he spoke or wrote them. Each carries the speech or the text it comes from and the date it is fixed to; where the source names the place, the place is in it too.
Every line here is set against a published source — most often his own Writings and Speeches or the Constituent Assembly Debates — and the wording is reproduced as printed, down to the spelling. Where a passage is trimmed it is cut at a sentence boundary and never across an argument. Nothing is paraphrased, and nothing is here that could not be placed.
1924
Educate, Agitate, Organise.
Three words, in that order. The education comes first because without it the agitation has nothing to say, and the organisation is last because it is the only one of the three that outlives the person who starts it.
1930
The best friends I have had in my life were some of my classmates at Columbia and my great professors, John Dewey, James Shotwell, Edwin Seligman and James Harvey Robinson.
Three years in New York were the first he spent anywhere that his caste was not the first thing known about him.
1935
The tap was operated by a peon. If he was not there the water could not be had; and I had to go without water. The situation can be summed up in the statement — no peon, no water.
Recalling the government high school at Satara, where he was not permitted to touch the water tap himself.
I was born a Hindu, but I solemnly assure you that I will not die a Hindu.
Said after five years of the Kalaram temple satyagraha at Nashik had failed to open a single temple door. Twenty-one years passed between this sentence and the conversion at Nagpur.
1936
Caste is not a division of labour, it is a division of labourers.
Against the defence that caste is simply an efficient allocation of work: an occupation can be changed, and a birth cannot.
You cannot build anything on the foundations of caste. You cannot build up a nation, you cannot build up a morality. Anything that you will build on the foundations of caste will crack and will never be a whole.
Political tyranny is nothing compared to social tyranny and a reformer who defies society is a much more courageous man than a politician who defies the government.
Written by a man who was about to do both, and who found the second easier.
1949
However good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot.
When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.
Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.
From the same speech, addressed to an assembly that had just spent two years working on a constitution and was about to hand the country to men it admired.
On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.
1951
To leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu society, untouched and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap.
Written after the Hindu Code Bill was abandoned. He was not permitted to read the statement in the House and released it to the press instead.
The lines that are not here
Search for Ambedkar's words and you will find a great many he never wrote. Some are sharpened rewrites of things he did say; others were composed long after his death and fastened to his name because the name lends them weight. This site carries none of them. The rule above is the whole reason it can be trusted at all: if a line cannot be placed in something he actually wrote or said, it is left out, however often it is repeated and however much it sounds like him.
The most shared of them is this one, printed on posters and read from platforms as his:
I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.
No source in his published work has been found for it. That is not proof he never said it — an absence of proof is not proof of absence — and if you can point to where it appears in print, please write in. Until then it stays down here, named as unplaced, rather than set above as though it were settled.
Corrections and citations are welcome and taken seriously — if you can source a line the site has left out, or fault one it has kept, write to suraj.dataknight@gmail.com.