Quotes about Struggle

They turn the heart away much more strongly than adversity and want do, as he says in his song (Deut. 32:15): "Having become swollen, fat, and thick, he rebelled"; and (Prov. 1:32): "The prosperity of the foolish destroys them"; as is said also in the German proverb: "You need strong legs to hold up under good days." For man endures evil more easily than good, as the poet says: "Luxury has invaded as a deadlier foe."2

The present facts are that the world is insane and rages when we confess Christ and believe in Him.

Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.

I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the "oughtness" that forever confronts him.

[W]hen you first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are), and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro... when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" - then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ears of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never."

There is such a thing as the freedom of exhaustion. Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up.... The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber.... To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.

It is historically and biologically true that there can be no birth and growth without birth and growing pains. Whenever there is the emergence of the new we confront the recalcitrance of the old. So the tensions which we witness in the world today are indicative of the fact that a new world order is being born and an old order is passing away.

I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship.

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever.