Love Quote by Morihei Ueshiba

Ueshiba’s warning isn’t soft-hearted pacifism; it’s a practical diagnosis of how the ego recruits morality as a weapon. The moment you start sorting people into “good” and “bad,” you’re no longer perceiving reality so much as building a scoreboard. That mental habit feels like discernment, but it quietly licenses contempt. “Maliciousness” enters not as a sudden villainous impulse, but as a tiny permission slip: if they’re “bad,” then your anger is righteous, your dismissal is deserved, your cruelty is just “honesty.”

Coming from an athlete who built Aikido around redirecting force rather than crushing an opponent, the subtext is performance-based. The real opponent is the reflex to compare. “Testing, competing with, and criticizing” are framed as self-sabotage because they leak attention. You stop refining your stance and start rehearsing your superiority. Even when you win, you’ve trained your mind to hunt for flaws in others, which means you’re also training it to hunt for flaws in yourself. Confidence becomes conditional, dependent on someone else being worse.

The context matters: Ueshiba’s Japan saw martial training tied to nationalism and hard hierarchies, where “good/bad” thinking could slide easily into dehumanization. His line pushes back by treating judgment as an internal opening, not a social duty. It’s an ethics built from mechanics: the sharper your need to rank people, the easier you are to destabilize.