Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 15 quotes from The White Tiger book by Aravind Adiga that I liked and saved while reading this book. I hope you will like these quotes too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Quotes on India
- My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.
- One fact about India is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down and then you will have the truth about that thing.
- These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in.
Quotes on Rich vs Poor
- A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My father’s spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog’s collar; cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.
- The dreams of the rich, and the dreams of the poor – they never overlap, do they? See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of? Losing weight and looking like the poor.
- The history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time.
Quotes for Entrepreneurs
- I am a self-taught entrepreneur. That’s the best kind there is, trust me.
- I absorbed everything – that’s the amazing thing about entrepreneurs. We are like sponges – we absorb and grow.
Other Quotes
- Indians just take to technology like ducks to water.
- The main thing to know about Delhi is that the roads are good, and the people are bad. The police are totally rotten.
- No servant can ever tell what the motives of his heart are. Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love – or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?
- Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you. It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans.
- Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence.
- A White Tiger keeps no friends. It’s too dangerous.
- You ask, “Are you a man or a demon?” Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are still sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.