Daily Inspiration Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi pulls off a delicate rhetorical maneuver here: he refuses the easy villain. In an era when anti-colonial politics could slide into blanket anti-capitalism, he draws a moral line not around money itself but around its deployment. That distinction is strategic. By declaring capital “not evil,” Gandhi disarms the charge that swaraj is just resentment dressed as policy, and he makes room for a future economy that can function without mimicking the extractive machinery of empire.

The subtext is an argument about agency and ethics. “Wrong use” points the finger away from abstraction and toward human choices - landlords, mill owners, colonial administrators, even consumers. He’s reframing exploitation as a spiritual and civic failure, not an inevitability baked into markets. That move also fits his broader method: change the social order by disciplining the self, then disciplining institutions. It’s why his critique of industrial modernity often lands less like Marx and more like a moral indictment of appetite.

Context matters: Gandhi is speaking to a society emerging from colonial economic distortion, where “capital” had become synonymous with foreign control and local deprivation. Yet he also knows independence will require infrastructure, credit, production - the boring, necessary tools of nation-building. The line “will always be needed” is almost a concession to reality, but it’s also a warning: you can’t abolish the means without rebuilding the ethics. His target isn’t wealth; it’s wealth unbound from duty.