Aging & Wisdom Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi is puncturing a very modern fantasy: that power equals progress, and progress means rearranging the external world until it finally behaves. By calling world-remaking "the myth of the atomic age", he’s not just timestamping the line; he’s indicting a mindset newly supercharged by industrial scale and, most ominously, nuclear force. The atomic age promised salvation through engineering and annihilation in the same breath. Gandhi’s phrasing turns that era’s swagger into something like a bad slogan: the bigger the tool, the bigger the illusion.

The rhetorical pivot is doing the heavy lifting. "Not so much...as" reverses the reader’s instincts, demoting conquest and invention to second-tier achievements. "Remake" appears twice, but it changes its moral valence mid-sentence. Remaking the world is framed as mythic, almost adolescent: a story we tell ourselves to justify domination. Remaking ourselves is presented as the real adult work, the only kind of transformation that doesn’t require collateral damage.

The subtext is a challenge to political actors who hide behind history’s machinery. Gandhi is saying: if your revolution doesn’t include discipline, restraint, and inner conversion, it’s just another bid for control wearing the costume of liberation. In the shadow of world war and rising techno-nationalism, he stakes out an unfashionable claim: the most consequential battlefield is character. The line flatters no empire, no ideology, no gadget. It offers a harder metric of greatness - one that can’t be measured in territory or tonnage, only in the kind of person you become.