“Hate the sin and not the sinner is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world... It is quite proper to resist and attack a system, but to resist and attack its author is tantamount to resisting and attacking oneself. For we are all tarred with the same brush, and are children of one and the same Creator, and as such the divine powers within us are infinite. To slight a single human being is to slight those divine powers, and thus to harm not only that being but with him the whole world.”
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Source: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Autobiography), Part IV, ch. 'A Tussle with Power'.
About this quote
Separating a person from their behavior lets you fight the wrong thing hard while leaving the door open for the wrongdoer to change. Attack the man and he digs in; challenge the practice and he can walk away from it without losing his dignity.
When to use it
- A manager criticizes a flawed process in the postmortem instead of blaming the engineer who followed it.
- During an argument, a couple names the specific habit that hurt them rather than calling each other bad people.
- A neighborhood group protests an unfair housing policy without vilifying the individual clerks who enforce it.