Breaking Silence Quotes - Page 2

• Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter - but beautiful - struggle for a new world.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Beautiful, Struggle, Long

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• A true revolution of values will see that the western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Feelings, Arrogance, Revolution

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2013). “"In a Single Garment of Destiny": A Global Vision of Justice”, p.119, Beacon Press

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• I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  World, Revolution, Sides

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Brother, Children, War

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. . . . Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, 'Too late.' ... Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Beautiful, Struggle, Procrastination

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Climate, Today, Facts

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today-my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Ghetto, Home, Boys

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,-
  Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown,
  Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

  James Russell Lowell

  Truth, Forever, Shadow

  'The Present Crisis' (1845)

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• Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard?

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Beautiful, Brother, Struggle

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift, is approaching spiritual death.I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Uplifting, Spiritual, Betrayal

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Brother, Compassion, Views

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

  Herman Melville

  Hope, Struggle, Soul

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• We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers and sisters.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Brother, Hands, Justice

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-antirevolutionaries.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Comfort, Arches, World

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. "A Time to Break Silence," at Riverside Church

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Journey, Men, Compassion

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2013). “"In a Single Garment of Destiny": A Global Vision of Justice”, p.119, Beacon Press

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• Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Reality, Love Is, Keys

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Inspirational, Life, Compassion

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission - a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man".

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Hard Work, Men, Brotherhood Of Man

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2013). “"In a Single Garment of Destiny": A Global Vision of Justice”, p.114, Beacon Press

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• A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Betrayal, War, Moving

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the hopes of men the world over.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Men, America, Long

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on.

  Omar Khayyam

  Moving, Writing, Fingers

  Omar Khayyam, Edward FitzGerald, Christopher Decker (1997). “Edward FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition”, p.194, University of Virginia Press

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• I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds of energies in rehabilitation of its poor as long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Adventure, Men, Skills

  Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Delivered 4 April 1967, Riverside Church, New York City

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• I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

  Martin Luther

  War, Enemy, Poor

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• Behind the dim unknown, Standeth God with the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

  James Russell Lowell

  Shadow, Watches, Providence

  James Russell Lowell, “The Present Crisis”

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• A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Justice, Revolution, Causes

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2013). “"In a Single Garment of Destiny": A Global Vision of Justice”, p.119, Beacon Press

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