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.
He was the average mortal. It troubled him to get used to the world one way and then suddenly have it turn different.
A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.
Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange.
To me, the idea and expectation that the day is slowly and surely coming when we will be able to honestly say we are our brother's keeper and not his oppressor is very beautiful .
Terrorism has become a festering wound. It is an enemy of humanity.
One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends.
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