It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends 500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only 53 annually on the victims of poverty.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the prioritization of military spending over addressing poverty.
Martin Luther King, Jr. highlights the stark contrast in funding between military operations, which consume vast resources to eliminate enemy threats, and the meager financial assistance allocated to combat poverty. This tragic discrepancy underscores a societal failure to value human life and welfare equally, raising questions about priorities and moral responsibilities in decision-making.
In practice
During a discussion on government budget allocations.
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.
Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.
In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.
Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.
At the foot of the cross, there are no racial barriers.
War is too serious a matter to leave to soldiers.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.