A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay.
Interpretation
Society tends to ignore its historical wrongs, but the effects of those wrongs can linger and demand acknowledgment.
This quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. highlights the tendency of societies to mask or forget their misdeeds in order to move on. However, the consequences of past injustices remain alive and impactful in the present. King emphasizes that the ongoing struggles against systemic injustices mean that a society must confront and address its past wrongs rather than sweep them under the rug. He suggests that true justice requires acknowledging these ugly truths.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of historical awareness.
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.
If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.
To regard the fundamental as the essence, to regard things as coarse, to regard accumulation as deficiency, and to dwell quietly alone with the spiritual and the intelligent - herein lie the techniques of Tao of the ancients.
I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.
Hell is not fire and brimstone, not a place where you are punished for lying or cheating or stealing. Hell is wanting to be something and somewhere different from where you are.
But an old age serene and bright, and lovely as a Lapland night, shall lead thee to thy grave.
Let's worship Divinity, but understand the divinity we worship is beyond our comprehension.
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