"I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him.
I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.
I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant."
--From his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Peace, 1964.
Image via J's Scratchpad.
1 comment:
Hello,
Just a friendly clarification about your photo credit:
Please don't credit j's scratchpad for the Martin Luther King, Jr., image. It is not from that weblog. You found it on a page that pulls XML feeds from other sources. While the image might have appeared on j's scratchpad, it and the credit for it belong to someone else or to a different institution.
= )
j Baumgart
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