In 1947 the book “Gandhi and Stalin” by Louis Fischer was published. If the Spirit, Who is Life, exacted an eye for an eye, or a tooth for a tooth, this world would indeed be peopled with the blind and the toothless. The Spirit and Beings continue unselfishly to maintain life upon our planet, restoring us nightly, and forgiving us our wilful blindnesses far beyond our spiritual or bodily capacity of repayment. The acknowledgment section of the book indicated that Spring was a follower of Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy : In 1944 a version of the maxim was used by Henry Powell Spring in his book of aphorisms, “What is Truth”. gentlemen in this House who would not, metaphorically speaking, be blind and toothless. If in this present age we were to go back to the old time of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ there would be very few hon. GRAHAM: We can argue all we like, but if capital punishment is being inflicted on some man, we are inclined to say: ‘It serves him right.’ That is not the spirit, I believe, in which legislation is enacted. He mentioned the well-known verse of Exodus and then employed it in a trope about the members of the Parliament : In 1914 politician and journalist George Perry Graham argued against the death penalty in the Canadian House of Parliament. Below are selected citations in chronological order. QI has located relevant variants for this longer expression in 19. There is a more elaborate version of the clever maxim based on these two phrases:Īn eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth would lead to a world of the blind and toothless. These words appear in the King James English translation. The epigram is a twist on a famous Biblical injunction in the Book of Exodus : Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. QI thinks some readers may have been confused and may have decided to directly attribute the saying to Gandhi based on a misreading of Fischer’s works. Instead, Fischer used the expression himself as part of his explanation of Gandhi’s philosophy. However, Fischer did not attribute the saying to Gandhi in his description of the leader’s life. The YBQ notes that an important biographer of Gandhi, Louis Fischer, used a version of the expression when he wrote about Gandhi’s approach to conflict. The Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence states that the Gandhi family believes it is an authentic Gandhi quotation, but no example of its use by the Indian leader has ever been discovered. “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” is frequently attributed to M. Shapiro editor of the Yale Book of Quotations (YBQ), has examined this question. Quote Investigator: One of the world’s top quotation experts, Fred R. Could you find out when and where Gandhi said this? I have read that Gandhi spoke this statement or something similar, but I haven’t yet found a precise citation for this. There is a well-known quotation that helps to express the rationale for this non-retaliatory philosophy:Īn eye for an eye will leave everyone blind. Mohandas Gandhi? George Perry Graham? Louis Fischer? Henry Powell Spring? Martin Luther King?ĭear Quote Investigator: Mohandas Gandhi’s policy of non-violence was famously used during the campaign for independence in India.
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