War & Peace Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

Friendship, Gandhi suggests, is often just good accounting: an exchange of loyalty for loyalty, warmth for warmth, an arrangement that flatters both sides and keeps the social machine running. The real moral stress test arrives when the relationship offers no obvious return. Befriending “the one who regards himself as your enemy” isn’t framed as saintly sentimentality; it’s a deliberate reversal of the usual logic of conflict, where hostility justifies hostility and fear licenses preemptive cruelty.

The phrase “regards himself as your enemy” matters. Gandhi smuggles in a psychological diagnosis: enmity is partly self-authored, sustained by narratives people tell about who threatens them and why. By targeting the enemy’s self-conception, Gandhi shifts the battlefield from territory and pride to perception and identity. Friendship becomes a form of nonviolent pressure: it refuses the roles that conflict requires. If I won’t perform “enemy,” your script starts to look flimsy.

Calling this “the quintessence of true religion” also sharpens the stakes. Gandhi isn’t praising ritual or doctrine; he’s treating religion as an ethic of disciplined action under provocation. “The other is mere business” is the sting: politeness to allies, charity within the in-group, even solidarity can be transactional, a kind of moral commerce.

In the context of anti-colonial struggle and communal fracture, the line reads as strategy as much as spirituality: nonviolence isn’t passive virtue, it’s an attempt to break the cycle that makes domination and revenge feel inevitable.