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.
Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.
Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?
And what do you wish?' he said at last. 'That what should be shall be,' she answered.
When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.
The person who talks most of his own virtue is often the least virtuous.
By repenting, one acknowledges them as sins-therefore not to be repeated.
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