Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? - "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free."
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the idea that a nation divided in its principles cannot endure.
This quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. reflects on the struggle for civil rights and the inherent contradiction in a society that allows both freedom and oppression. King suggests that true survival and unity of a nation depend on its commitment to justice and equality, and that a compromise between freedom and slavery is unsustainable.
In practice
In a speech advocating for civil rights, one might quote this to highlight the necessity of unity in the fight for equality.
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
Music is the best consolation for a despaired man
We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.
We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
Israel... is one of the great outpost of democracy in the world
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises.
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.
The past is always tense, the future perfect.
Ideas come from the Earth. They come from every human experience that youβve either witnessed or have heard about, translated into your brain in your own sense of dialogue, in your own language form. Ideas are born from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized. Ideas are probably in the air, like little tiny items of ozone.
History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.
Everyone, including the Athenians [...] are right to accept advice from anyone, since it is incumbent on everyone to share in that sort of excellence, or else there can be no city at all.
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