The Quest for Peace and Justice
---Doctor Martin Luther King
It is impossible to begin this lecture without again expressing my deep appreciation to the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament for bestowing upon me and the civil rights movement in the United States such a great honor. Occasionally in life there are tho moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by tho symbols called words. Their meaning can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart. Such is the moment I am prently experiencing. I experience this high and joyous moment not for mylf alone but for tho devotees of nonviolence who have moved so courageously against the ramparts of racial injustice and who in the process have acquired a new estimate of their own human worth. Many of them are young and cultured. Others are middle aged and middle class. The majority are poor and untutored. But they are all united in the quiet conviction that it is better to suffer in dignity than to accept gregation in humiliation. The are the real heroes of the freedom struggle: they are the noble people for whom I accept the Nobel Peace Prize.
This evening I would like to u this lofty and historic platform to discuss what appears to me to be the most pressing problem confronting mankind today. Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the as and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man's scientific and technological progress.
Yet, in spite of the spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the a like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.
让我想一想Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expresd in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau1: "Improved means to an unimproved end". This is the rious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual "lag" must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the "without" of man's nature subjugates the "within", dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.
太行山上歌曲
怎样炸肉丸子又脆又好吃>中秋节灯笼This problem of spiritual and moral lag, which constitutes modern man's chief dilemma, express itlf in three larger problems which grow out of man's ethical infantilism. Each of the problems, while appearing to be parate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.
The first problem that I would like to mention is racial injustice. The struggle to eliminate the evil of racial injustice constitutes one of the major struggles of our time. The prent upsurge of the Negro people of the United States grows out of a deep and passionate determination to make freedom and equality a reality "here" and "now". In one n the civil rights movement in the United States is a special American phenomenon which must be understood in the light of American history and dealt with in terms of the American situation. But on another and more important level, what is happening in the United States today is a relatively small part of a world development.
We live in a day, says the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead2安全生产教育培训内容,"when civilization is shifting its basic outlook: a major turning point in history where the presuppositions on which society is structured are being analyzed, sharply challenged, and profoundly changed." What we are eing now is a freedom explosion, the realization of "an idea who time has come", to u Victor Hugo's phra3. The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited mass, rising from dungeons of oppres
陌生人聊天开场白奶油制作方法>燕子读后感sion to the bright hills of freedom, in one majestic chorus the rising mass singing, in the words of our freedom song, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn us around."4 All over the world, like a fever, the freedom movement is spreading in the widest liberation in history. The great mass of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and land. They are awake and moving toward their goal like a tidal wave. You can hear them rumbling in every village street, on the docks, in the hous, among the students, in the churches, and at political meetings. Historic movement was for veral centuries that of the nations and societies of Western Europe out into the rest of the world in "conquest" of various sorts. That period, the era of colonialism, is at an end. East is meeting West. The earth is being redistributed. Yes, we are "shifting our basic outlooks".
