"You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just and there are unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that An unjust law is no law at all.Now what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Relativism
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Relativism
48 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Relativism →
Related Quotes
"Ethical relativism reminds us that different societies have different moral beliefs and that our beliefs are deeply i…"
"The proclamation of relativism is provocative. (...) I am not particularly interested in being an apostle of relativi…"
"Can an idea — a notion as abstract as Relativism — produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy…"
"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, …"
"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its high…"
"in a society, in a culture, which all too often make relativism its creed - relativism has become a sort of dogma - i…"
"To confuse our own constructions and inventions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusion…"
"The language of relativism is parasitic on the language of absolutism."
"Nietzsche … tried to apply to his own thought the teachings of cultural relativism. This practically nobody else does…"
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."