The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. It destroys communities and makes humanity impossible. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers... In winning our freedom, we will so appeal to you heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the futility of revenge and advocates for compassion and understanding.
Martin Luther King Jr. critiques the 'eye for an eye' principle, suggesting that it only perpetuates a cycle of violence and harms both victims and perpetrators. He argues for a more humane approach to conflict resolution that appeals to the heart and conscience, promoting healing and unity rather than division and brutality.
In practice
In a speech addressing social justice, the quote can highlight the importance of compassion over revenge.
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.
True liberty consists not merely in being free from something, but also in being free for something.
They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.
When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. As you see him, you will see yourself. As you treat him, you will treat yourself. As you think of him, you will think of yourself. Never forget this, for in him you will find yourself or lose yourself.
Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it.
Nobody seriously believes the universe was made by God without being persuaded that He takes care of His works.
What now does the divine immanence mean in direct Christian experience? It means simply that God is here. Wherever we are, God is here. Ther eis no place, there can be no place, where He is not.
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