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.
Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is.
When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.
There are a few dogmas and double standards and really regrettable exports from philosophy that have confounded the thinking of scientists on the subject of morality.
The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?
In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.
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