In any civilized society, it is every citizen's responsibility to obey just laws. But at the same time, it is every citizen's responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
Interpretation
Citizens must follow fair laws while also challenging unjust ones.
This quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasizes the dual responsibility of citizens in a society: to uphold the law when it is just and fair, and to resist and challenge laws that are unjust. It reflects a moral imperative to advocate for justice and equality, highlighting that obedience to law does not mean passive acceptance of injustice.
In practice
During a speech at a civil rights rally to inspire activism against unfair laws.
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.
Nothing is harder to see into thanpeoples nature. The sage looks at subtle phenomena and listens tosmall voices. This harmonizes the outside with the inside and the inside with the outside.
I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.
At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the suffering of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful.
Awareness is bad for the meat business. Conscience is bad for the meat business. Sensitivity to life is bad for the meat business. DENIAL, however, the meat business finds indispensable.
The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.
The young man knows that he is irretrievably lost. This is no town of cats, he finally realizes. It is the place where he is meant to be lost. It is another world, which has been prepared especially for him. And never again, for all eternity, will the train stop at this station to take him back to the world he came from.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.