Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of acting on one's conscience rather than seeking safety, popularity, or political gain.
In this quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. underscores the struggle between choosing a path that is safe, politically advantageous, or popular, versus the moral imperative to do what is right. He advocates for taking a stand based on conscience, even when it is uncomfortable or unpopular, highlighting the necessity of courage in the pursuit of justice and moral integrity.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about social justice to inspire action for what is morally right.
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.
I do not accept being a prisoner of fear. Of Communism, of fascism. That, one can bear. But of one's fear. No. Never.
Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I'd try to read my lessons, and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter.
When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree by the river of truth, and tell the whole world - No, you move.
Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.
Fear is the dream killer, the silent voice that pushes us to lose our passion in a vain attempt to seek safety.
Sometimes I would come back from a run, and my artificial leg would have a puddle of blood from my stump. I wouldn't go to sick bay. In that year, if I had gone to sick bay, they would have written me up. I didn't go to sick bay. I'd go somewhere and hide and soak my leg in a bucket of hot water with salt in it--an old remedy. Then I'd get up the next morning and run.
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