“Here and there an individual or group dares to love, and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity. So in a real sense this is a great time to be alive.”

—  Martin Luther King, Jr.

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)
Context: Here and there an individual or group dares to love, and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity. So in a real sense this is a great time to be alive. Therefore, I am not yet discouraged about the future. Granted that the easygoing optimism of yesterday is impossible. Granted that those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face uncomfortable jail terms, painful threats of death; they will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to the nagging feeling that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden, and the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. Granted that we face a world crisis which leaves us standing so often amid the surging murmur of life's restless sea. But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. It can spell either salvation or doom. In a dark confused world the kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Here and there an individual or group dares to love, and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity. So in a real …" by Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. 658
American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Ci… 1929–1968

Related quotes

Stanley Baldwin photo

“Democracy can rise to great heights; it can also sink to great depths. It is for us so to conduct ourselves, and so to educate our own people, that we may achieve the heights and avoid the depths.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at the Albert Hall (4 December 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 70-71.
1924
Context: It is a testing time for democracy... Democracy, democratic government, calls for harder work, for higher education, for further vision than any form of government known in this world. It has not lasted long yet in the West, and it is only by those like ourselves who believe in it making it a success that we can hope to see it permanent and yielding those fruits which it ought to yield. The assertion of people's rights has never yet provided that people with bread. The performance of their duties, and that alone, can lead to the successful issue of those experiments in government which we have carried further than any other people in this world. Democracy can rise to great heights; it can also sink to great depths. It is for us so to conduct ourselves, and so to educate our own people, that we may achieve the heights and avoid the depths.

“For Peake, the weight of moral standards comes from their being part of a tradition, and any tradition lies outside the individual’s potential and needs. Thus adherence to a morality impedes development of the whole self and denies real maturity.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Joseph L. Sanders, “The Passions in Their Clay” Mervyn Peake’s Titus Stories, reprinted in the omnibus edition The Gormenghast Novels published by The Overlook Press, p. 1098

“How dare any state or group of individuals do more. Or less.”

Robert Nozick book Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Source: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; Utopia and the Minimal State, p. 333
Context: Is not the minimal state, the framework for utopia, an inspiring vision?
The minimal state treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources; it treats us as persons having individual right with the dignity this constitutes. Treating us with respect by respecting our rights, it allows us, individually or with whom we please, to choose our life and to realize our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by the voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity. How dare any state or group of individuals do more. Or less.

Yukio Mishima photo

“Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain.”

Yukio Mishima book Sun and Steel

Source: Sun and Steel (1968), p. 87.
Context: Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.

Mwanandeke Kindembo photo

“Moses was such a great prophet and philosopher at the same time. He even dared to question and ask for God's real name.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author
Max Stirner photo

“Whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the spook, the “true man,” and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual, the real man.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

S. Byington, trans. (1913), p. 383
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

“The inability of business and political leadership to rise to new heights [required by the] unprecedented situation, [familiar to us now as the Great Depression.. urged for] bold policies…bold anything is needed at this time.”

Wallace Brett Donham (1877–1954) American academic

As cited by Drew Gilpin Faust, " Harvard Business School Centennial http://www.harvard.edu/president/speech/2008/harvard-business-school-centennial," at harvard.edu, October 14, 2008.
"The Failure of Business Leadership and the Responsibility of the Universities", 1933

Steven Pinker photo

“Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”

Steven Pinker book The Blank Slate

p. 485 http://books.google.com/books?id=ePNi4ZqYdVQC&q=%22humans+are+interchangeable%22
The Blank Slate (2002)
Source: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Context: [E]quality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. … If we recognize this principle, no one has to spin myths about the indistinguishability of the sexes to justify equality.

Marc Jacobs photo

“I like people who have a sense of individuality. I love expression and anything awkward and imperfect, because that’s natural and that’s real.”

Marc Jacobs (1963) American fashion designer
Alex Grey photo

“Love is what makes us alive,
That is why we feel so alive when we love.
Service is being available to love.

Life is the combustion of love.

That we love ourselves here,
That is the true magnificence
In the mountains of being.”

Alex Grey (1953) American artist

Art Psalms (2008), The Vast Expanse

Related topics