Dr King
Posted: Friday, April 04, 2008 by Travis Cody in
January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968
He was a leader for us all.
His words are as powerful now as they were when he first spoke them.
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge,
aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. (Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 11, 1964)
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty. (Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967)
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. (Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963)
It's easy to be cynical these days about tolerance and peace. I'm not saying that there aren't things worth fighting for, because there are. But the fight won't always require a closed fist. Sometimes the fight calls for an open mind.
Thanks for reminding me, I don't know where my head is I didn't remember what Friday was. Hopefully I'll get time to make a post about this important man.