When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the challenges of progress and creativity within society.
Martin Luther King, Jr. uses the imagery of dreary days and dark nights to illustrate the difficult times a civilization faces when it is on the brink of significant change. The 'creative turmoil' represents the struggles and conflicts that arise during this transformative process, suggesting that enduring hardship is often part of a necessary evolution toward a better society.
In practice
During a speech about social reform, you could say this quote to emphasize the idea that progress often arises from hardship.
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.
My long struggles as a soldier of the Chinese Revolution have forced me to realize the necessity of facing hard facts. There will be neither peace, nor hope, nor future for any of us unless we honestly aim at political, social and economic justice for all peoples of the world, great and small.
The swiftness of time is infinite, as is still more evident when we look back on the past.
I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.
No man can be subject to any laws, excepting those which have received the assent of himself or his representatives and which are promulgated beforehand and applied legally.
We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races -- by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.
We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don't care for.
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