A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay.
Interpretation
Society tends to ignore its historical wrongs, but the effects of those wrongs can linger and demand acknowledgment.
This quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. highlights the tendency of societies to mask or forget their misdeeds in order to move on. However, the consequences of past injustices remain alive and impactful in the present. King emphasizes that the ongoing struggles against systemic injustices mean that a society must confront and address its past wrongs rather than sweep them under the rug. He suggests that true justice requires acknowledging these ugly truths.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of historical awareness.
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.
Most horses don't walk backwards voluntarily, because what they can't see doesn't exist.
The whole argument with the anti-suffragists, or even the critical suffragist man, is this: that you can govern human beings without their consent.
If we use goods made from raw materials that are obtained from a poor country without the proceeds being used to benefit the people of that country, we become complicit in a particularly iniquitous form of grand larceny.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
I don't think anyone is qualified to answer questions of eternal fate definitively, much less pinpoint it to a given day.
I don't mind a dirty girl. But what I find tragic is when we, as women, become not the subject of our own story but someone else's object.
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