The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were hanged at Lahore on 23 March 1931, less than three weeks after Gandhi had signed his truce with the Viceroy, Lord Irwin (5 March), and on the eve of the Congress session at Karachi; young men met Gandhi there with black flowers in protest. At a press interview in Karachi on 26 March he said he had failed to have the death sentences commuted, paid tribute to the three men’s bravery while asking for the greater bravery of the non-violent, and said the executions did not change his position on the settlement. Asked whether it was not impolitic to forgive a government guilty of a thousand murders, and then whether any country had ever shown such forgiveness as India was showing Britain, he gave this answer.

Forgiveness is not the resort of the powerless but an act only the strong are capable of, and there is no limit to how much one may forgive; what holds for a person holds for a nation.

Shared as a maxim about forgiving people in private life. Gandhi said it of a nation and its rulers, days after the executions, answering those who thought it impolitic to forgive the government that had hanged them.

• Mahatma Gandhi, 1920: In ‘The Doctrine of the Sword’ (1920): forgiveness is more manly than punishment and adorns a soldier, but abstinence is forgiveness only when there is the power to punish; it is meaningless when it pretends to proceed from a helpless creature.

Power, Society, Politics, Morality, Wisdom

• Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
• The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Martin Luther King Jr.
• It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living pleasantly. Epicurus
• We do not have a very short time assigned to us, but we lose a great deal of it Seneca the Younger
• No pleasure is in itself evil, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves. Epicurus

• archive.org/details/HindSwaraj-CWMG-045 (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. XLV, item 398, pp. 344–345, page images)
• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi (1930s: ‘Interview to the Press’ in Karachi, Young India, 2 April 1931; Wikiquote gives 23 March 1931 as the date of the executions and cites the online edition, vol. 51)

Mahatma Gandhi, Articles in Indian Opinion, Young India and Harijan (1931), Interview to the press, Karachi, 26 March 1931, as reported in Mahadev Desai’s “Weekly Letter”, Young India, 2 April 1931 (Collected Works, vol. XLV, item 398, p. 345). Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/the-weak-can-never-forgive/ (23 October 2026).

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