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Monday, January 18, 2016

Joining Love and Power


...And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites – polar opposites – so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a resignation of love. 

We’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.

-       Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his final presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967


2 comments:

Dawn said...

I haven't read this before. Thought provoking.

P. J. Grath said...

I hadn't heard or read it before either, Dawn, so when I ran across it yesterday morning (what a coincidence!) in a book, I had to share it.