One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on humanity's moral responsibility towards animals and a future realization of shared existence.
In this quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks to the eventual understanding that the belief in the superiority over other animals is fundamentally absurd. He suggests that as humanity evolves, there will come a time when we recognize the shared existence and moral equivalency with other living beings, leading to a more compassionate and worthy way of cohabiting the planet.
In practice
In a speech about animal welfare legislation.
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.
Scientific culture created a framework within which individual mobility was possible without threatening hierarchical work-force allocation. On the contrary, meritocracy reinforced hierarchy. Finally, meritocracy as an operation and scientific culture as an ideology created veils that hindered perception of the underlying operations of historical capitalism.
He who can make distinction in God without number or quantity, knows that the three persons of the Trinity are one God.
Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today.
Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity.
Humankind is never what he is but the self he seeks.
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.