That old law about “an eye for an eye” leaves everybody blind.

Martin Luther King Jr. used this line while arguing against retaliatory violence and in favor of nonviolent resistance during the civil-rights struggle. Drawing on the biblical lex talionis (“eye for an eye”), he framed vengeance as a self-defeating moral logic that perpetuates cycles of harm rather than producing justice. The remark appears in his 1958 book-length exposition of nonviolence, written in the wake of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and amid escalating backlash against civil-rights activism. King’s point was both ethical and strategic: nonviolence aims to break the spiral of reprisal and to win public conscience rather than to “defeat” an opponent by inflicting equivalent injury.

The aphorism compresses King’s critique of retributive justice into a vivid paradox: if everyone insists on exact repayment for injury, the end state is universal ruin. “Blindness” works literally (escalating physical harm) and metaphorically (moral and spiritual incapacity to see the humanity of the other). King contrasts punishment-as-payback with a justice oriented toward reconciliation and social repair. The line also functions rhetorically as a universalizing warning: retaliation may feel fair in the moment, but it multiplies suffering and forecloses the possibility of community. In King’s nonviolent philosophy, refusing revenge is not passivity; it is an active method for transforming conflict without reproducing its violence.

“An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.”