Justice & Law Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi flips the usual moral math of law-and-order: the violence doesn’t begin when bodies hit the street, it begins when the state writes injustice into rulebooks and calls it “order.” By labeling an unjust law “a species of violence,” he refuses the comforting fiction that violence is only physical. Bureaucracy can bruise. Paper can bludgeon. The phrase is surgical because it relocates harm from the moment of protest to the everyday machinery that makes oppression look routine.

The second sentence sharpens the blade. “Arrest for its breach is more so” exposes how enforcement escalates the original wrong: the state doesn’t just impose an unfair rule; it compounds it with handcuffs, courts, and cages. Gandhi is also preempting a familiar accusation aimed at civil disobedience: that breaking laws invites chaos. His subtext is that the chaos is already here, built into the legal code, and policed into compliance.

Context matters: Gandhi is speaking from within an empire that loved legalism. British colonial rule in India didn’t always need massacres to dominate; it relied on regulations that controlled movement, labor, and dignity, then punished defiance as criminality. The quote is a rhetorical permission slip for nonviolent resistance that still takes conflict seriously. Nonviolence, for Gandhi, isn’t passivity; it’s a way of forcing the state to reveal its coercive core. When a government answers a moral challenge with arrests, it confirms his point: legality can be the mask violence wears to look respectable.