Time & Perspective Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi treats a "principle" less like a rulebook and more like a horizon line: something you navigate by, not something you ever fully arrive at. The opening move is deliberately unforgiving. A principle, he argues, is perfection itself, not a handy guideline. That absolutism is the point. By defining principle at its most demanding, he raises the moral stakes of everyday choices and strips away the comforting idea that we can be basically ethical while remaining conveniently unchanged.

Then he pivots to a bracing admission: humans are imperfect, so we cannot "practise perfection". The subtext isn’t resignation; it’s a warning about how quickly ideals get domesticated. "We devise every moment limits of its compromise" is Gandhi at his most psychologically shrewd, diagnosing the way people (and movements, and governments) manufacture small exceptions in real time. Compromise isn’t portrayed as a thoughtful negotiation with reality; it’s a constant, self-authored trimming of the ideal to fit appetite, fear, or fatigue.

In context, this sits squarely inside Gandhi’s political ethics: satyagraha, nonviolence, and self-discipline as public tools. He’s speaking to activists who want results, now, and are tempted to treat ends as permission slips. Gandhi’s rhetorical strategy is to make compromise feel like an active choice, not an inevitability. If you’re always drawing new boundaries around what your principle requires, you’re not managing complexity; you’re redesigning your conscience on the fly.