A few quotes to remember this season

Martin Luther King Jr.

 

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

“I have decided to stick to love...Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

“Faith is taking the first step even when you can't see the whole staircase.”

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

“But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

 

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him”

 

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor 

popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”

 

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

“We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

“There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

“We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 

“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”

 

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

 

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

 

“By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”

 

“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”

 

“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.”

 

“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.’

 

“Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.”

 

“We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.”

 

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

Jacques Ellul

"The person who imagined that he could not be the victim of propaganda because he could distinguish truth from falsehood, is extremely susceptible to propaganda, because when propaganda does tell the truth, he is then convinced that it is no longer propaganda: moreover, his self-confidence makes him all the more vulnerable to attacks of which he is unaware." 

 

"Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions...

The important thing is that when the time is ripe, the individual can be thrown into action by the utilization of the psychological levers that have been set up." 

 

"No one knows where we are going, the aim of life has been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Man has set out at tremendous speed- to go nowhere." 

 

"The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief" 

 

"The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment." 

 

"If the ruler wants to play the game by himself and follow secret policies, he must present a decoy to the masses. He cannot escape the mass; but he can draw between himself and that mass an invisible curtain, a screen, on which the mass will see projected the mirage of some politics, while the real politics are being made behind it." 

 

"Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve." 

 

"There is a limited elite that understands the secrets of their own techniques, but not necessarily of all techniques. These men are close to the seat of modern governmental power. The state is no longer founded on the 'average citizen', but on the ability and knowledge of this elite. The average man is altogether unable to penetrate technical secrets or governmental organization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state." 

 

"Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor's edge." 

 

"One thing, however, is sure: unless we fulfill our prophetic role, unless we become the advocates and defenders of the truly poor, witness to their misery, then, infallibly, violence will suddenly break out. In one way or another 'their blood cries to heaven,' and violence will seem the only way out. It will be too late to try to calm them and create harmony."