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Who really said it

The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind

Written by Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968 · Baptist minister and civil rights leader
Verified In copyright

This exact sentence appears in King’s first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, published by Harper & Brothers and released on 17 September 1958; Quote Investigator cites it to page 213 ↗. The idea is older than King, and the better-known “makes the whole world blind” version pinned on Gandhi has never been traced to Gandhi at all.

Last verified 27 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Verified quote & credit

“The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind” Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 213.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. (licensed exclusively through Intellectual Properties Management); current edition published by Beacon Press in its King Legacy series). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

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Provenance

The documented source

Work
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
Author
Martin Luther King Jr.
Published
Harper & Brothers, New York — officially released 17 September 1958
Page
213, per Quote Investigator’s citation of the 1958 edition

The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. Book, 1958

The sentence sits inside King’s case against retaliatory violence, which he calls “both impractical and immoral” — impractical because, in his argument, it spirals downward into destruction for everyone; immoral because it seeks to humiliate an opponent rather than win him over. Stride Toward Freedom is King’s memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott. The passage is quoted in full by Quote Investigator ↗.

Scanned 1958 Harper edition
Stride toward freedom; the Montgomery story (New York: Harper, 1958)
Stanford King Institute: Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

How we checked it

In copyright

Stride Toward Freedom was first published in 1958, so it remains under copyright in the United States. The Stanford King Institute ↗ states that it “cannot give permission to use or reproduce any of the writings” of King and directs requests to Intellectual Properties Management, “the exclusive licensor of the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc.” A current in-print edition is issued by Beacon Press in the King Legacy series ↗.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

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Fact-check

The tangle around this line

Unusually for a King quotation, the words really are his. The confusion runs the other way: the aphorism King was reworking is one of the most misattributed sayings on the internet, and the version most people can recite belongs to neither King nor the man it is credited to.

Mahatma Gandhi No source found

Quote Investigator ↗ reports that no example of Gandhi using the saying has ever been discovered, and that the Yale Book of Quotations records only a second-hand belief, via the Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, that the family thinks it authentic — with no year, place or work attached. Wikiquote files it under “Misattributed” ↗.

Louis Fischer, Gandhi’s biographer Biographer’s own words

Fischer used the image twice while describing Gandhi’s philosophy — “an ‘eye for an eye’ which, in the end, would make everybody blind” in Gandhi and Stalin (1947), and a version in The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950) — but did not attribute the words to Gandhi ↗. Quote Investigator suggests Fischer’s books may have inadvertently helped establish the misattribution.

John Briley, screenwriter of the 1982 film Gandhi Film dialogue

The Oscar-winning biopic put “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind” into Gandhi’s mouth, which Quote Investigator credits with popularising the association ↗. Wikiquote cites a 1993 Michigan Today profile of Briley by Jon Krampner ↗ reporting that Gandhi never said it and that Briley wrote the words.

Quotation websites Misquoted and spliced

Aggregators circulate “That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing” as one King quotation — as Quotefancy does, with no source given ↗. That is a reworded first half welded to a separate King sentence; the published book reads “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.”

King wrote it, in 1958, in his own book — but he was reworking an image already in circulation: the earliest form located by Quote Investigator ↗ is from Canadian MP George Perry Graham, arguing against capital punishment in the House of Commons on 5 February 1914.

Context

Why King reached for it

Stride Toward Freedom was King’s account of the Montgomery bus boycott, written while the movement was still young and, in the King Institute’s telling ↗, produced against publishing deadlines with significant guidance from Stanley Levison, Bayard Rustin and Harris Wofford. The book lays out three ways oppressed people meet oppression — acquiescence, violence, and nonviolent resistance — and this sentence is the hinge of the argument against the second.

The phrasing matters. King does not say revenge is wrong because it is unkind; he says the arithmetic of reciprocal harm does not close. It is an argument about outcomes aimed at people who thought nonviolence was naive, which is why he pairs “impractical” with “immoral” rather than leading with the moral claim.

Everyone remembers the Gandhi version. The sourced version is King’s.

Read the full story

King was deeply read in Gandhian thought — the King Institute notes that the book’s “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” chapter works through the influence of Thoreau, Marx, Aristotle, Rauschenbusch and Gandhi on his thinking. That lineage is real, and it is part of why the aphorism and the two men became fused in popular memory.

But influence is not authorship. The documented chain runs: a 1914 parliamentary flourish, a biographer’s 1947 and 1950 paraphrases of Gandhi’s philosophy, King’s own 1958 sentence, and a 1982 screenplay line — and only one link in that chain is a named author saying it in his own published book.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Justice Wisdom Kindness

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: An Eye for an Eye Will Make the Whole World Blindquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation: the 1914 earliest citation, Louis Fischer’s 1947 and 1950 paraphrases, King’s 1958 sentence at page 213, and the 1982 film.
Mahatma Gandhi — Misattributeden.wikiquote.org

Files the saying under “Misattributed” with a dated chronology including the 1914, 1950, 1958 (King) and 1982 (film) citations.
Martin Luther King Jr. on Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Carries the full Stride Toward Freedom passage under “Three Ways of Meeting Oppression (1958)”, and also lists the sentence under “Disputed” because of the aphorism’s murky origin.
Stride toward freedom; the Montgomery story (1958)archive.org

Catalogue record and scan of a 1958 Harper printing of the book containing the line.
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Storykinginstitute.stanford.edu

Stanford’s King Institute on the book’s writing, its Harper & Brothers contract, and its release on 17 September 1958.
Stride Toward Freedom (King Legacy edition)beacon.org

The current in-print edition, with an introduction by Clayborne Carson — relevant to the book’s live copyright status.

The author

About Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

1929–1968 · Baptist minister and leader of the American civil rights movement

Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968, advancing civil rights through nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalised discrimination. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) was his first book, an account of the Montgomery bus boycott that doubled as his first full statement of the philosophy behind it. Because his name is among the most quoted in English, it is also among the most falsely quoted — which makes the genuinely sourced lines, like this one, worth marking as sourced.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 213. Page reference per Quote Investigator ↗; release date of 17 September 1958 per the Stanford King Institute ↗.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind’?” Last verified 27 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-old-law-of-an-eye-for-an-eye-leaves-everybody-blind/

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