We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
Interpretation
We must take responsibility for our inaction against wrongdoing, not just the actions of those who do harm.
This quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasizes the moral obligation of individuals to speak out against injustice. It highlights that the failure to act or to remain silent in the face of wrongdoing is as culpable as the actions of those causing harm, urging people to be proactive in standing up for what is right.
In practice
This quote can be used in speeches advocating for social justice.
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.
We've had enough of exhortations to be silent! Cry out with a hundred thousand tongues. I see that the world is rotten because of silence.
At Tara in this fateful hour, I place all Heaven with its power, And the sun with its brightness, And the snow with its whiteness, And the fire with all the strength it hath, And the lightning with its rapid wrath, And the winds with their swiftness along their path, And the sea with its deepness, And the rocks with their steepness, And the earth with its starkness: All these I place, By God's almighty help and grace Between myself and the powers of darkness!
I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I'm therefore not a pacifist at all - or am I?
There are always a lot of people so afraid of rocking the boat that they stop rowing. We can never get ahead that way.
A sword in hand is a sure sign of a violent mind; but one does not become non-violent merely by throwing the sword away.
Let's cool it brothers . . . Spoken to his assassins, three men who stabbed him 16 times.
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