“Inconvenience in progress, work is regretted.”

“When it comes to work - hurry, hurry, hurry. When it comes to payment - delay, delay, delay. Caste, religion, family background nothing. Talent everything.”

“The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters or entrepreneurs. The coop is guarded from the inside.”

“Go to the tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop - men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still "boys." But that is your fate if you do your job well - with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.”

“Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That's not to say I don't respect them, Mr. Premier! Don't you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. 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.”

“Any good society survives on a circulation of favours.”

“In a socialistic economy, the small businessman has to be a thief to prosper.”