There's something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.
Interpretation
Love has a constructive power, while hate is destructive; hence, loving one's enemies is essential.
This quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. highlights the transformative power of love compared to hate. It suggests that love not only uplifts and builds but also serves as a potent force for positive change, even towards those who oppose us. By advocating for love towards our enemies, King encourages us to transcend conflict and foster understanding, compassion, and healing in a divided world.
In practice
Using this quote at a peace rally to emphasize the importance of compassion.
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.
I am a princess. All girls are. Even if they live in tiny old attics. Even if they dress in rags, even if they aren’t pretty, or smart, or young. They’re still princesses.
It is love; love, the comfort of the human species, the preserver of the universe, the soul of all sentient beings, love, tender love.
This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.
The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.
Wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty like a Scotch jig--and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance and with his bad legs falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave.
Even more than we want good love for ourselves, we want it for our children, those vulnerable satellites of our hearts that we send, unsteady, into the world.
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