“Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”

Source: If Beale Street Could Talk

Last update July 16, 2025. History

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James Baldwin 163
(1924-1987) writer from the United States 1924–1987

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1914: "If…we were to go back to…'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' there would be very few [Honourable] Gentlemen in this House who would not…be blind and toothless." — George Perry Graham, during a debate on capital punishment before the Canadian House of Commons. Official Report of the Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada, Third Session-Twelfth Parliament, Vol CXIII, p. 496, February 5, 1914. http://parl.canadiana.ca/view/oop.debates_HOC1203_01/508
1950: "An-eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye … ends in making everybody blind" in The Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer (1950), though Fischer did not attribute it to Gandhi and seemed to be giving his own description of Gandhi's philosophy.
1958: "The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind" in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story by Martin Luther King, Jr., 1958.
1982: "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind" in the 1982 film, Gandhi. In a 1993 biographical article about screenwriter John Briley, Jon Krampner wrote, "…Gandhi never said it. Michigan graduate John Briley put those pithy words in his mouth." From "John Briley '51 - Epic Screenwriter", Michigan Today, March 1993, p. 12. http://michigantoday.umich.edu/93/Mar_and_Oct_93/Mar_93/briley.html
2006: There is a quaternary source in Yale Book of Quotations http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=w5-GR-qtgXsC&pg=PA269&dq=whole-world-blind+ (2006), in which editor Fred R. Shapiro states that the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence stated that Gandhi's family believes it authentic, but did not provide any further reference and provided no year, place or body of work.
2006: Discussed in The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When, by Ralph Keyes (2006), 1st ed., p. 74.
2010: Research detailed by Garson O'Toole in "An Eye for an Eye Will Make the Whole World Blind" http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/27/eye-for-eye-blind/ in Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/.
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