I appeal for cessation of hostilities, not because you are too exhausted to fight, but because war is bad in essence. You want to kill Nazism. You will never kill it by its indifferent adoption. Your soldiers are doing the same work of destruction as the Germans. The only difference is that perhaps yours are not as thorough as the Germans. If that be so, yours will soon acquire the same thoroughness as theirs, if not much greater. On no other condition can you win the war. In other words, you will have to be more ruthless than the Nazis. No cause, however just, can warrant the indiscriminate slaughter that is going on minute by minute. I suggest that a cause that demands the inhumanities that are being perpetrated today cannot be called just.

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Source: To Every Briton, 1940 (Gandhi's open letter/appeal during WWII); Wikiquote sourced entry.

About this quote

Fight something with its own methods and you slowly become it. The warning is about means shaping ends: adopt your enemy's cruelty to win, and victory just installs that cruelty under a new name. A goal reachable only through inhuman acts isn't as just as it claims.

When to use it

  • A manager fighting a backstabbing rival refuses to spread rumors, since matching those tactics would poison their own team.
  • A parent answers a child's hitting without hitting back, so force isn't taught as the lesson.
  • An activist against censorship still refuses to shout down opponents' speech.