Justice & Law Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

Progress is not just Gandhi's moral preference here; it is his political weapon. "Constant development" reframes change as something closer to gravity than ideology: a law you can ignore only at the cost of self-deception. Coming from a leader who built mass movements on discipline, principle, and sacrifice, the line also preempts a common accusation against him and against any public figure who evolves: inconsistency.

The target is the kind of consistency that functions as vanity. Gandhi spots how "dogmas" become stage props, maintained "in order to appear" coherent. That phrasing matters. The problem isn't conviction; it's performance. Once your identity depends on never revising a belief, you stop listening to reality, and politics turns into reputational management. The "false position" is both ethical and strategic: morally, you end up defending yesterday's errors; tactically, you become predictable, brittle, easy to trap.

Context sharpens the point. Gandhi's career unfolded through experiments - with nonviolence, with communal living, with political tactics that shifted from petitions to non-cooperation to civil disobedience. He often revised methods publicly, and his willingness to admit missteps was itself part of the persuasion. The quote is a defense of principled flexibility: keep the moral compass, update the map.

It also contains a warning aimed at movements as much as individuals. Dogma can solidify a cause into a church, where purity replaces effectiveness and loyalty replaces thought. Gandhi insists that living politics requires the humility to change course without pretending you never did.