Daily Inspiration Quote by Jawaharlal Nehru

Humility, here, isn’t a private virtue; it’s a governing strategy. Nehru’s line moves in two measured steps: first a moral appeal ("be a little humble"), then an epistemic warning ("the truth may not perhaps be entirely with us"). That hedge of "a little" and "may not perhaps" isn’t weakness. It’s deliberate constitutional language for a country trying to become a democracy without becoming a tyranny of certainties.

The context matters: Nehru is speaking out of the pressure-cooker of postcolonial state-building, when politics tempts leaders to swap foreign rule for domestic absolutism. India’s independence movement had to weld together ideologies, religions, languages, and regions, all while partition and violence made moral certainty feel emotionally satisfying. In that atmosphere, to concede even the possibility that you’re not fully right is to refuse the easiest fuel of mass politics: righteousness.

The subtext is aimed as much at allies as opponents. Nehru is policing the instincts of a victorious movement that could easily mistake mandate for infallibility. "Truth" becomes plural in practice: not relativism, but democratic discipline. He’s arguing that legitimacy in a diverse republic comes less from winning arguments once than from keeping arguments possible.

Rhetorically, the sentence performs what it demands. It softens the listener, lowers the temperature, invites dissent without surrender. Nehru isn’t asking citizens to abandon conviction; he’s insisting that conviction, unchecked, is how liberation curdles into dogma.