Rights and Duties

153. The true source of rights is duty. If we all discharge our duties, rights will not be far to seek. If leaving duties unperformed we run after rights, they will escape us like a will-o’-the-wisp. The more we pursue them, the farther will they fly. The same teaching has been embodied by Krishna in the immortal words: ‘Action alone is thine. Leave thou the fruit severely alone.’ Action is duty: fruit is the right.
–YI. 8-1-25, 15.

The Greatest Good of All

154. A votary of ahimsa cannot subscribe to the utilitarian formula (of the greatest god of the greatest number). He will strive for the greatest good of all and die in the attempt to realize the ideal. He will therefore be willing to die, so that the others may live. He will serve himself with the rest, by himself dying. The greatest good of all inevitably includes the good of the greatest number, and therefore, he and the utilitarian will converge in many points in their career but there does come a time when they must part company, and even work in opposite directions. The utilitarian to be logical will never sacrifice himself. The absolutist will even sacrifice himself.

–YI, 9-12-26, 432.

The End and The Means

148. They say ‘means are after all means’. I would say ‘means are after all everything’. As the means so the end. Indeed the Creator has given us control (and that too very limited) over means, non over the end. Realization of the goal is in exact proportion to that of the means. The is a proposition that admits of no exception. –YI, 17-7-24, 236.

149. The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. –IHR, 39.

150. One I said ‘In spinning wheel lies Swaraj’, next I said ‘In prohibition lies Swaraj’. In the same way I would say in cent per cent swadeshi lies Swaraj lies Swaraj. Of course, it is like the blind men describing the elephant. All of them are right and yet not wholly right. –H, 28-9-34, 259.

151. It seems that the attempt made to win Swaraj is Swaraj itself. The faster we run towards it, the longer seems to be the distance to be traversed. The same is the case with all ideals. –Nat, 685.

152. Though you l have emphasized the necessity of a clear statement of the goal, but having once determined it, I have never attached importance to its repetition. The clearest possible definition of the goal and its appreciation would fail to take us there, if we do not know and utilize the means of achieving it. I have, therefore, concerned myself principally with the conservation of the means and their progressive use. I know if we can take care of them attainment of the goal is assured, I feel too that our progress towards the goal is assured. I feel too that our progress towards the goal will be in exact proportion to the purity of our means.

This method may appear to be long, perhaps too long, but I am convinced that it is the shortest.
 –ABP, 17-9-33.