Love and Power

Got this from a friend today. Hit home brightly and loudly.


Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites—so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. We’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitute the major crisis of our time.


-Martin Luther King, Jr., address to the 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on August 16, 1967, in Atlanta , Georgia