The person who strikes you is not always your greatest danger.

Sometimes your greatest danger is your own desire to strike back — and the whole victory lies in mastering it.

I want to be careful here, because this is the heart of what I learned and it is easy to hear it wrong, as a counsel of passivity, and it is the opposite of that.

I am not saying that one should never respond to being wronged, or that the meek inheriting the earth means lying down under every blow.

I responded to being wronged with more force and more finality than a returned slap could ever have carried; I ended a marriage, emptied a house, and enforced every clause of a contract.

What I am saying is far more specific, and far more useful: that when someone provokes you, the response your rage demands is very often the exact response designed to defeat you, and that the discipline of declining that particular response — while pursuing a better one — is where real power lives.