Hamêd’s Reviews > Strength to Love > Status Update

The ultimate weakness of Communism is that it robs man of that quality which makes him man. Man, says Paul Tillich, is man because he is free. This freedom is expressed through man's capacity to deliberate, decide, and respond. Under Communism, the individual soul is shackled by the chains of conformity; his spirit is bound by the manacles of party allegiance. He is stripped of both conscience and reason.

Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy.

Martin Luther King, Jr. __ Strength to Love

At times in our lives the tail winds of joy, triumph, and fulfillment favor us, and at times the head winds of disappointment, sorrow, and tragedy beat unrelentingly against us. Shall we permit adverse winds to overwhelm us or will our inner spiritual engines sustain us in spite of the winds? Our refusal to be stopped, our "courage to be," our determination to go on "in spite of," reveal the divine image within us.

Every person must have a concern for self and feel a responsibility to discover his mission in life...After one has discovered what he is made for, he should surrender all of the power in his being to the achievement of this...No one ever makes a great contribution to humanity without this majestic sense of purpose and this dogged determination.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Strength to Love

- Modern man is presently having a rendezvous with chaos, not merely because of human badness, but also because of human stupidity.

- If modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war and eventually transforms his earthly habitat into an inferno such as even the mind of Dante could not imagine, it will have resulted from downright badness and also from downright stupidity.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying...We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the 'ought' and the 'is', represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

More than ever before, my friends, men of all races and nations are today challenged to be neighborly. The call for a worldwide good-neighbor policy is more than an ephemeral shibboleth; it is the call to a way of life which will transform our imminent cosmic elegy into a psalm of creative fulfillment...We cannot long survive spiritually separated in a world that is geographically together.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

We must make a choice. Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds? Will we march only to the music of time, or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soul-saving music of eternity?... "Be ye not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind."
Strength to Love