Please be peaceful. We believe in law and order. We are not advocating violence, I want you to love your enemies... for what we are doing is right, what we are doing is just -- and God is with us.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of non-violence and love, even towards adversaries, based on a moral conviction of justice.
In this quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. calls for peaceful resistance while asserting that love for enemies is a fundamental principle in the pursuit of justice. He underscores the belief that righteous actions are supported by a higher moral authority and encourages individuals to remain steadfast in their commitment to non-violence despite the challenges they face.
In practice
In a speech advocating for peaceful protests, this quote can emphasize the importance of non-violent resistance.
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.
If you hold your fire until you see the whites of his eyes, you will never know what hit you.
There's nothing wrong with being afraid. It's not the absence of fear, it's overcoming it. Sometimes you've got to blast through and have faith.
When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia - which was inappropriate, certainly that . . . to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people.
It's better to die laughing than to live each moment in fear.
The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.
You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.
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