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.
I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
The point of asylum is not to declare to the world what country you think is the pinnacle of civilization. The point of asylum is to find a country that's both willing and able to protect you from political persecution. In no way is asylum an endorsement of a country's politics, laws, or values.
However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about the lives we create for the living beings most within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless--it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.
The essential things in life are seen, not with the eyes but with the heart.
Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.
God Most High has said, "Is the reward of virtue aught save virtue?" . . . Know, O man, that the covenant of servanthood is incumbent upon you, and that the covenant of Lordship is incumbent upon His magnanimity, as He Most High has said, ". . . and fulfill your covenant, I shall fulfill My covenant."
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