1. The Nobel Committee declined to award the Nobel Peace Prize in 1948 because “There was no suitable living candidate.” This was meant as tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, who was assassinated earlier that year without receiving the Prize.
2. Winston Churchill despised Gandhi, and when he tried to hunger strike, Churchill was in favor of letting him die
3. Gandhi used to sleep naked next to young Indian girls in order to test his resolve to chastity
4. Mahatma Gandhi used to travel with his goat so that he could have fresh milk.
5. Gandhi married at the age of 13. Recalling his wedding, he once said “We didn’t know much about marriage, for us it meant only wearing new clothes, eating sweets and playing with relatives.” He first became a father at 15, in spite of his wife spending most of her time at her mothers.
6. In 1937, Hitler told a British official that the British should “shoot Gandhi, and if this doesn’t suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of the Congress, and if that doesn’t suffice, shoot 200, and so on, as you make it clear that you mean business.”
7. Gandhi expressed racist views towards Black people at several points in his lifetime
8. Leo Tolstoy wrote a book in 1908 called “Letter to a Hindu” in which he argued that the only way for India to gain independence from Britain was through non-violent resistance. Gandhi read this book and others by Tolstoy. They struck up a correspondence and the course of history was changed.
9. Gandhi never said, “First, they ignore you. Then, they ridicule you. And then, they attack you and want to burn you. And then, they build monuments to you.” It was a union leader. Nicholas Klein said it in a 1914 address to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in Baltimore.
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