Famous Slogans and Quotes and Their Authors
Exam notes on famous slogans and quotations: the freedom struggle, post-independence slogans, quotations of leaders and the mottoes of Indian institutions.
By GK24 Editorial Team· Published · 3 min read
Every paper that carries a general awareness section carries a slogan question. The pattern never changes: a famous line is quoted and four names are offered, or a name is given and four lines are offered. The marks are easy because the list is short and fixed, yet candidates lose them by mixing up the leaders who worked in the same years and said similar things. These notes set out the slogans, the quotations and the institutional mottoes that are actually asked, each with the person or the text it came from.
Slogans of the freedom struggle
| Slogan | Given by | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it | Bal Gangadhar Tilak | Extremist phase of the Congress |
| Vande Mataram | Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay | Written in his novel Anandamath |
| Inquilab Zindabad | Hasrat Mohani | Made famous by Bhagat Singh in the Assembly |
| Simon Go Back | Yusuf Meherally | Protests against the Simon Commission, 1928 |
| Quit India | Yusuf Meherally | Coined for the movement of August 1942 |
| Do or Die (Karo ya Maro) | Mahatma Gandhi | Call given with the Quit India Movement |
| Give me blood, and I shall give you freedom | Subhas Chandra Bose | Address to the Indian National Army |
| Dilli Chalo and Jai Hind | Subhas Chandra Bose | Slogans of the Indian National Army |
| Sare Jahan Se Achha | Muhammad Iqbal | The patriotic song Tarana-e-Hindi |
| Go back to the Vedas | Dayanand Saraswati | Founder of the Arya Samaj |
| Educate, Agitate, Organise | B. R. Ambedkar | Call to the depressed classes |
| Maro Firangi Ko | Mangal Pandey | Revolt of 1857 |
Notice how often one name answers several questions. Yusuf Meherally, a socialist leader and once Mayor of Bombay, coined both Simon Go Back and Quit India, and that single fact clears two separate questions. Subhas Chandra Bose is behind three of the best known calls, all from his Indian National Army years.
Slogans given after independence
- Jai Jawan Jai Kisan — Lal Bahadur Shastri, raised in 1965 to honour the soldier and the farmer together.
- Jai Jawan Jai Kisan Jai Vigyan — Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who added science to Shastri's pair in 1998.
- Aram Haram Hai — Jawaharlal Nehru, telling a new nation that rest was forbidden.
- Garibi Hatao — Indira Gandhi, the slogan of the 1971 general election.
- Sampoorna Kranti, or Total Revolution — Jayaprakash Narayan, given at Patna in 1974.
- Jai Jagat — Vinoba Bhave, who led the Bhoodan movement.
Quotations that are asked by name
Some lines are set not as slogans but as quotations, and the examiner wants the speaker.
- Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny and At the stroke of the midnight hour — Jawaharlal Nehru, in the speech of 14-15 August 1947.
- The light has gone out of our lives — Jawaharlal Nehru, announcing the death of Mahatma Gandhi.
- Sanitation is more important than independence — Mahatma Gandhi, who placed cleanliness above political freedom in his order of priorities.
- Arise, awake and stop not till the goal is reached — Swami Vivekananda, who took the thought from the Katha Upanishad.
- Government of the people, by the people, for the people — Abraham Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address of 1863.
- Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in The Social Contract.
- I have a dream — Martin Luther King Junior, Washington, 1963.
Mottoes of Indian institutions
A motto is an official slogan, and papers treat this table as pure static general knowledge.
| Body | Motto |
|---|---|
| Republic of India | Satyameva Jayate, taken from the Mundaka Upanishad |
| Supreme Court of India | Yato Dharmastato Jayah |
| Lok Sabha | Dharmachakra Pravartanaya |
| Indian Air Force | Nabhah Sparsham Diptam, taken from the Bhagavad Gita |
| Indian Navy | Sham No Varunah |
| All India Radio | Bahujan Hitaya Bahujan Sukhaya |
| Doordarshan | Satyam Shivam Sundaram |
| Life Insurance Corporation of India | Yogakshemam Vahamyaham |
| National Cadet Corps | Unity and Discipline |
Where candidates slip
- Inquilab Zindabad was first used by the poet Hasrat Mohani; Bhagat Singh only made it famous, so he is the wrong answer when the question says coined.
- Vande Mataram was written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, not by Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote Jana Gana Mana.
- Shastri gave three words in 1965 and Vajpayee added the fourth in 1998; read whether the question quotes Jai Vigyan.
- Satyameva Jayate comes from the Mundaka Upanishad and not from the Rigveda or the Bhagavad Gita.
Exam Point of View
Three question shapes cover almost everything asked here. The first quotes a slogan and asks for the person, the second names a person and asks for the slogan, and the third asks which text a motto comes from. The traps are built on pairs that sit close together: Tilak against the rest of Lal, Bal and Pal; Bankim Chandra against Rabindranath Tagore; Hasrat Mohani who coined Inquilab Zindabad against Bhagat Singh who made it famous; Shastri's three words against Vajpayee's four; and the Mundaka Upanishad against the Bhagavad Gita for the two best known mottoes. Read the verb in the question carefully, because coined, gave and made famous are not the same thing and the examiner chooses the word deliberately.
Important Facts
| Swaraj is my birthright | Bal Gangadhar Tilak |
|---|---|
| Vande Mataram | Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, in Anandamath (1882) |
| Inquilab Zindabad | Coined by Hasrat Mohani |
| Simon Go Back and Quit India | Yusuf Meherally |
| Do or Die | Mahatma Gandhi, Quit India Movement, 1942 |
| Give me blood, and I shall give you freedom | Subhas Chandra Bose |
| Jai Jawan Jai Kisan | Lal Bahadur Shastri, 1965 |
| Jai Jawan Jai Kisan Jai Vigyan | Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 1998 |
| Garibi Hatao | Indira Gandhi, 1971 general election |
| Sampoorna Kranti | Jayaprakash Narayan, Patna, 1974 |
| Satyameva Jayate | Mundaka Upanishad; national motto below the State Emblem |
| Nabhah Sparsham Diptam | Bhagavad Gita; motto of the Indian Air Force |
| Sare Jahan Se Achha | Muhammad Iqbal |
| Educate, Agitate, Organise | B. R. Ambedkar |
Practice MCQs on this topic
"Sanitation is more important than independence" — Who said this?
- A.C Rajagopalachari
- B.Mahatma Gandhi
- C.Jawaharlal Nehru
- D.Subhash Chandra Bose
Show answer
Cleanliness was a lifelong concern for him; he cleaned latrines himself at Sabarmati and Sevagram, insisted that every satyagrahi do the same, and declared on more than one occasion that sanitation mattered more than political freedom, because a nation that could not keep itself clean would not know what to…
Read the full explanation →Who among the following gave the slogan "Freedom is my birthright and I will have it"?
- A.Mahatma Gandhi
- B.Bal Gangadhar Tilak
- C.Bipin Chandra Pal
- D.Lala Lajpat Rai
Show answer
The Maratha leader, called Lokmanya and described by the British as the father of Indian unrest, declared that swaraj was his birthright and that he would have it, and the sentence became the rallying cry of the extremist wing of the Congress in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Read the full explanation →The slogan "Jai Jawan Jai Kisan" was given by:
- A.Jawaharlal Nehru
- B.Lal Bahadur Shastri
- C.Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel
- D.Indira Gandhi
Show answer
He raised the slogan in 1965, when the country was fighting a war on one side and facing a shortage of food grains on the other, and the two words placed the soldier and the farmer side by side as the twin defenders of the nation.
Read the full explanation →Who coined the slogans "Simon Go Back" and "Quit India"?
- A.Jawaharlal Nehru
- B.Yusuf Meherally
- C.Ram Manohar Lohia
- D.Achyut Patwardhan
Show answer
A socialist leader who later became Mayor of Bombay, he coined Simon Go Back for the protests that met the Simon Commission in 1928, and in 1942 he suggested the two words Quit India, which the Congress adopted as the name of its last great movement.
Read the full explanation →The slogan "Inquilab Zindabad" was first given by:
- A.Bhagat Singh
- B.Hasrat Mohani
- C.Chandrashekhar Azad
- D.Ashfaqullah Khan
Show answer
The Urdu poet and nationalist, who was also among the first to demand complete independence, coined the phrase in the early nineteen twenties, and it means long live the revolution.
Read the full explanation →"Give me blood, and I shall give you freedom" is associated with:
- A.Bhagat Singh
- B.Subhas Chandra Bose
- C.Chandrashekhar Azad
- D.Lala Lajpat Rai
Show answer
He used the line while raising and addressing the Indian National Army in South East Asia during the Second World War, asking his soldiers for the ultimate sacrifice in return for the freedom of the country; Dilli Chalo and Jai Hind come from the same years and the same army.
Read the full explanation →The song "Vande Mataram" was written by:
- A.Rabindranath Tagore
- B.Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay
- C.Sarojini Naidu
- D.Muhammad Iqbal
Show answer
He wrote the song in Sanskritised Bengali and placed it in his novel Anandamath, published in 1882; it was sung at the Congress session of 1896 and became the chief song of the national movement, and the Constituent Assembly later gave it the same honour as the national anthem.
Read the full explanation →The national motto of India, "Satyameva Jayate", has been taken from which text?
- A.Rigveda
- B.Mundaka Upanishad
- C.Bhagavad Gita
- D.Manusmriti
Show answer
The full line is Satyameva Jayate Nanritam, meaning truth alone triumphs, not falsehood, and the first two words were inscribed in Devanagari below the Lion Capital of Ashoka when the State Emblem was adopted in 1950.
Read the full explanation →"Arise, awake and stop not till the goal is reached" is a call given by:
- A.Raja Ram Mohan Roy
- B.Swami Vivekananda
- C.Dayanand Saraswati
- D.Ramakrishna Paramahamsa
Show answer
He repeated the line constantly in his lectures to Indian youth after returning from the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, and the thought is drawn from the Katha Upanishad.
Read the full explanation →The slogan "Garibi Hatao" was the main election slogan of:
- A.Jawaharlal Nehru in 1952
- B.Indira Gandhi in 1971
- C.Morarji Desai in 1977
- D.Rajiv Gandhi in 1984
Show answer
Two words promising the removal of poverty carried her to a very large majority in the general election of that year, and the phrase has been quoted in Indian politics ever since.
Read the full explanation →The call for "Sampoorna Kranti", or Total Revolution, was given in 1974 by:
- A.Jayaprakash Narayan
- B.Ram Manohar Lohia
- C.Acharya Narendra Dev
- D.Charan Singh
Show answer
Speaking at Patna in 1974 during the student movement in Bihar, he asked for a total revolution covering social, economic, political, cultural and educational life, and the movement he led became the gathering point for the opposition to the government of the day.
Read the full explanation →The motto of the Indian Air Force, "Nabhah Sparsham Diptam", is taken from the:
- A.Rigveda
- B.Bhagavad Gita
- C.Mundaka Upanishad
- D.Arthashastra
Show answer
The words, meaning touch the sky with glory, come from the eleventh chapter of the Gita, where the universal form of the Lord is described, and they were adopted as the motto of the Indian Air Force.
Read the full explanation →Frequently Asked Questions
Who gave the slogan Quit India?
The words were suggested by Yusuf Meherally, a socialist leader and later Mayor of Bombay, and the Congress adopted them for the movement launched in August 1942. Mahatma Gandhi led that movement and gave it the companion call Do or Die, but the phrase Quit India itself was coined by Meherally, who had earlier coined Simon Go Back.
Did Bhagat Singh coin the slogan Inquilab Zindabad?
No. The phrase was coined by the Urdu poet and nationalist Hasrat Mohani. Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt shouted it in the Central Legislative Assembly in 1929, which made it the best known revolutionary slogan in India, but making a slogan famous is different from coining it, and papers test exactly this difference.
Where does the national motto Satyameva Jayate come from?
It comes from the Mundaka Upanishad, where the full line is Satyameva Jayate Nanritam, meaning truth alone triumphs, not falsehood. The two words were inscribed in Devanagari below the Lion Capital of Ashoka when the State Emblem of India was adopted in 1950.
Who added Jai Vigyan to Jai Jawan Jai Kisan?
Lal Bahadur Shastri gave Jai Jawan Jai Kisan in 1965 to honour the soldier and the farmer. Atal Bihari Vajpayee added the words Jai Vigyan in 1998, placing the scientist beside them, so a question that quotes the longer version is asking about Vajpayee and not about Shastri.
Who wrote Vande Mataram and who wrote Jana Gana Mana?
Vande Mataram was written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and appeared in his novel Anandamath in 1882. Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem, was written by Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore also set a tune to Vande Mataram, which is why the two names are so often exchanged in answer sheets.
Sources
- National Symbols of India — National Portal of India
- India and the Contemporary World II (Class X), Chapter 2: Nationalism in India — NCERT
- Themes in Indian History Part III (Class XII), Chapter 13: Mahatma Gandhi and the Nationalist Movement — NCERT
