When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the challenges of progress and creativity within society.
Martin Luther King, Jr. uses the imagery of dreary days and dark nights to illustrate the difficult times a civilization faces when it is on the brink of significant change. The 'creative turmoil' represents the struggles and conflicts that arise during this transformative process, suggesting that enduring hardship is often part of a necessary evolution toward a better society.
In practice
During a speech about social reform, you could say this quote to emphasize the idea that progress often arises from hardship.
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.
Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.
Ambition is a gilded misery, a secret poison, a hidden plague, the engineer of deceit, the mother of hypocrisy, the parent of envy, the original of vices, the moth of holiness, the blinder of hearts, turning medicines into maladies, and remedies into diseases.
It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis.
A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
There is no space in which worship should not take place, no time when it should not occur, and no activity through which it should not happen.
Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.
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