An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed in retaliation.
Interpretation
Retaliating against evil with more evil does not bring redemption or justice.
Coretta Scott King suggests that responding to wrongdoing with further wrongdoing does not correct the original wrong and often perpetuates a cycle of harm. True justice and healing come from breaking this cycle and responding with a moral and ethical approach, even in the face of injustice.
In practice
In a speech about nonviolent conflict resolution.
I've always felt that homophobic attitudes and policies were unjust and unworthy of a free society and must be opposed by all Americans who believe in democracy. The civil rights movement thrives on unity and inclusion, not division and exclusion. My husband's struggle parallels that of the gay rights movement.
...We have an historic opportunity for a great global healing and renewal. If we will accept the challenge of nonviolent activism with faith, courage, and determination, we can bring this great vision of a world united in peace and harmony from a distant ideal into glowing reality.
I think if people really read Martin Luther King, Jr., then they would begin to understand what he really represented.
It doesn't matter how strong your opinions are. If you don't use your power for positive change, you are, indeed, part of the problem.
Sometimes, I am also identified as a civil rights leader or a human rights activist. I would also like to be thought of as a complex, three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human being with a rich storehouse of experiences, much like everyone else, yet unique in my own way, much like everyone else.
People don't ever have to starve to death; there are solutions. We have failed if we can't eradicate hunger in Africa and Ethiopia.
The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.
The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.
Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.
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