How can you render the duties of justice to men when you're afraid they'll be so unaware of justice they may destroy you? ...especially since their attitude toward their own race is a destructive one.

John Howard Griffin
About This Quote

Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the most well known civil rights activists of all time. During his speech titled "The Negro's Vocation", he outlines the idea that the racial identity of a person should not be seen as a barrier to their ability to obtain justice. Many people who are not part of minority groups tend to view justice as something only for members of their own race. King suggests that we must look beyond our own race and see justice as something for everyone because we all need it and we all deserve it.

Source: Black Like Me

Some Similar Quotes
  1. We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky. - Walter Mosley

  2. One day spent with someone you love can change everything. - Mitch Albom

  3. There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note,... - Douglas Adams

  4. If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it. - C.s. Lewis

  5. People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn't. It continues and is ever-changing. - Jandy Nelson

More Quotes By John Howard Griffin
  1. He was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths.

  2. The author meets an African-American who observes that his fellows who begin with aspirations to a good education, solid career, and the raising of a family slowly lose that incentive. Even those who have a college education, he observes, need to take menial jobs and...

  3. The author explains that some find recourse from injustice in literature and art but that these tend to deepen sensitivity to injustice rather than dull it.

  4. Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the...

  5. How can you render the duties of justice to men when you're afraid they'll be so unaware of justice they may destroy you? ...especially since their attitude toward their own race is a destructive one.

Related Topics