Daily Inspiration Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

Revenge is framed here not as justice misapplied, but as a kind of public-health disaster: a cycle that spreads damage until no one can see straight. Gandhi’s genius is the way he smuggles a radical political program into a proverb. “An eye for an eye” invokes the ancient logic of proportional retribution, the reassuring idea that punishment can be measured, contained, made fair. Gandhi accepts the premise just long enough to flip it. Even “equal” retaliation accumulates; arithmetic becomes epidemic.

The subtext is strategic, not saintly. Gandhi isn’t merely urging private forgiveness. He’s arguing that retaliation is a dead-end policy for peoples living under empire, where the state holds the monopoly on organized violence and will always win escalation. Nonviolence, in this light, is less moral exhibitionism than political engineering: deny the oppressor the script that justifies crackdown, force legitimacy onto the battlefield, make brutality visible and therefore costly.

The line’s bite comes from its sensory finality. “Blind” isn’t abstract; it’s a world unable to navigate, to recognize neighbor from enemy, to imagine alternatives. It also slyly implicates the avenger: the person who insists on exact payback ends up maimed in the same moral transaction. In the context of colonial India and the combustible pressures of partition-era politics, Gandhi’s warning lands as both ethical indictment and pragmatic forecast: a society committed to vengeance doesn’t balance accounts; it bankrupts its future.