America must begin the struggle for democracy at home. The advocacy of free elections in Europe by American officials is hypocrisy when free elections are not held in great sections of America.
Interpretation
Democracy should start within a nation's own borders before advocating for it elsewhere.
In this quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasizes the importance of practicing democracy internally before promoting it abroad. He argues that it is hypocritical for American leaders to call for free elections in other countries while failing to ensure that free and fair elections are upheld in their own nation, highlighting a critical inconsistency in their political stance.
In practice
During a political debate about election integrity, one might quote this to emphasize the need for domestic reform.
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.
The greatest need of my people is my own holiness.
The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.
There isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. All the time, we find animals doing things that, in our arrogance, we thought were just human.
Life must have its sacred moments and its holy places. We need the infinite, the limitless, the uttermost -- all that can give the heart a deep and strengthening peace.
From the viewpoint of analytic psychology, the theatre, aside from any aesthetic value, may be considered as an institution for the treatment of the mass complex.
While the West has enjoyed overwhelming global power, its moral preachings have been legitimised, and in effect enforced, by that power. But as that power begins to ebb, then the morality of its actions will be the subject of growing scrutiny and challenge.
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