Daily Inspiration Quote by Jawaharlal Nehru

It’s a deliberately unromantic defense of democracy, pitched not as a creed but as a choice made under pressure. Nehru’s line refuses the soaring moral certainty that nationalist leaders are often expected to perform. Instead, he offers a cold comparison test: democracy isn’t “good” because it perfects human nature, but because its rivals concentrate power in ways history keeps proving lethal.

The intent is pragmatic persuasion. In the decades around Indian independence, democracy was hardly the default option for new states; the world was watching authoritarian “efficiency” parade itself as modernity, from fascist regimes to Soviet-style one-party rule. Nehru, tasked with welding a vast, plural, traumatized society into a functioning polity, needed an argument that could survive disappointment. Elections would be messy. Institutions would be slow. Corruption and faction would flare. The line preemptively admits all that without surrendering the premise.

The subtext is a warning disguised as modesty. By framing democracy as the least-bad system, Nehru smuggles in the fear that citizens, frustrated by disorder, might be tempted by “strong” alternatives. He doesn’t romanticize the people; he trusts the system’s ability to limit damage when people (and leaders) fail. That’s why it works rhetorically: it lowers the temperature. Instead of asking for faith, it asks for memory - a ledger of what happens when dissent is criminalized and power stops having an exit route.

In Nehru’s mouth, “worse” isn’t abstract. It’s the lived record of empire, war, partition, and the ever-present risk that liberation can curdle into a new hierarchy wearing different clothes.