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.
It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion.
I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.
To go to the world below, having a soul which is like a vessel full of injustice, is the last and worst of all the evils.
Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.
The law speaks too softly to be heard amidst the din of arms.
He who affirms that Christianity makes men miserable, is himself an utter stranger to it.
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