One of the most persistent ambiguities that we face is that everybody talks about peace as a goal. However, it does not take sharpest-eyed sophistication to discern that while everbody talks about peace, peace has become practically nobody's business among the power-wielders. Many men cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace.
Interpretation
While many advocate for peace, true commitment to achieving it is often lacking among those in power.
In this quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. highlights the contradiction between the widespread desire for peace and the lack of action taken by influential leaders to foster it. He suggests that although many people vocalize the importance of peace, they often neglect the necessary steps to achieve it, revealing a disconnect between words and deeds in the pursuit of harmony.
In practice
During a peace rally, this quote could be used to emphasize the importance of action alongside advocacy.
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.
No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.
You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
Because you are a great lord, you believe yourself to be a great genius. You took the trouble to be born, but no more.
Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character.
I've stopped war reporting. I realized that I'd answered all of my questions about war and about myself.
A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.
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