Lukewarm acceptance is more bewildering than outright rejection.
Interpretation
Indifferent approval can be more confusing than clear refusal.
Martin Luther King, Jr. emphasizes that a lack of passionate support or outright acceptance often leads to more confusion and misunderstanding than direct rejection. This suggests that clear stances, whether supportive or opposing, are essential for understanding and progressing social causes.
In practice
This quote can be used during a rally to encourage people to take a firm stance on social issues.
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.
It's easier to aim to please and say what others want to hear than to form an opinion and fight for it, even if it means taking a risk or losing your job.
You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.
The strength of a wall is neither greater nor less than the courage of the men who defend it.
Although I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.
Listen to me, kid. Don't forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every many for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even you father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone. Let me give you good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father. You cannot help him anymore. And you are hurting yourself. In fact, you should be getting his rations.
We, the soldiers who have returned from battle stained with blood, we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes, we who have attended their funerals and cannot look into the eyes of their parents, we who have come from a land where parents bury their children, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians We say to you today in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough.
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