Bending The Arc Quotes

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

I don’t give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency, towards whose shift the arc of the universe bends. But maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

...the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, but justice needs help. Justice only happens when good people take a stand against injustice. The moral arc of the universe needs people to support it as it bends. And yes, it also needs people to pick a side.

Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived - maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of televisions programs, of e-mails, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I am going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscape we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

The arc of the universe may bend toward justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own.

To escape Thucydides’s Trap, we must be willing to think the unthinkable—and imagine the unimaginable. Avoiding Thucydides’s Trap in this case will require nothing less than bending the arc of history.

doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice. It has to be bent, and this requires sheer force of will. It demands our sharpest focus and most concentrated effort. History does not move in a straight line; it has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, all the way down the line.

The arc of history is long, but it bends towards zombie apocalypse.

Theodore Parker, who said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, but sometimes the universe needs a little help.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

As Martin Luther King, Jr., put it in a phrase drawn from the abolitionist Theodore Parker, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Bends, not swerves—but what we can miss in this cold-eyed understanding of history is that the arc won’t even bend without devoted Americans pressing for the swerve.

I don’t give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency – towards whose Shift the arc of the universe bends. But maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win.

If the long arc of history bends toward social justice, it also bends toward environmental justice and ecological sanity.

The arc of history does not bend toward justice unless we bend it.

The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Martin Luther King Jr

By following its own legal traditions, the arc of the Western moral universe never bends towards Indigenous justice. At best, it ignores it. At worst, it annihilates it.

You’d never break this one. You’d never even bend her. She’d die like Joan of Arc first, and spit blood on you through a smile.

Maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s no such thing as justice, in the sense of some kind of real reparation of a wrong. No eye for an eye, no matter what. Especially historical justice, or climate justice. But over the long haul, in some rough sense, that’s what we have to try for. That’s what our ministry is about. We’re trying to set things up so that in the future, over the long haul, something like justice will get created. Some long-term ledger of more good than bad. Bending the arc and all that. No matter what happened before, that’s what we can do now.

It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compass arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea.

We are going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. So however difficult it is during this period, however difficult it is to continue to live with the agony and the continued existence of racism, however difficult it is to live amidst the constant hurt, the constant insult and the constant disrespect, I can still sing we shall overcome. We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne."   Yet that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the Bible is right.  "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all of God's children all over this nation - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, "Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We are Free At Last.

You are quarter ghost on your mother’s side. Your heart is a flayed peach in a bone box. Your hair comes away in clumps like cheap fabric wet. A reflecting pool gathers around your altar of plywood sub flooring and split wooden slats. You are rag doll prone. You are contort, angle and arc. Here you rot. Here you are a greening abdomen, slipping skin, flesh fly, carrion beetles. This is where bullets take shelter, where scythes find their function, breath loses its place on the page. This is where the page is torn out of every book before chapter’s close, this is slippage, this is a shroud of neglect pulled over the body, this is your chance to escape. Little wraith, bend light around your skin until it colors you clear, disappear like silica in a kiln, become glass and glass beads, become the staggered whir of an exhaust fan: something only noticed when gone. Become an origami swan. Fold yourself smaller than ever before. Become less. More in some ways but less in the way a famine is less. They will forgive you for not being satisfied with fitting in their hands. They will forgive you for dying to be a bird diminutive enough to fit in a mouth and not be crushed.

the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”3 It was one of the greatest speeches of Dr. King’s career,

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” “Perhaps

Until Americans replace mythology with history, until Americans unveil and halt the progression of racism, an arc of the American universe will keep bending toward injustice.

Rumor's the slut you bend over a chair and never see again. Truth's the lady you wed.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” she said. But then she added her own words: “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.

With Love, the pivot of change emerges, the lever stretches long enough to move the world, the arc of the universe bends toward justice, the spirit of humanity soars, and the flood of life revives.

Visionary fiction” is a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice. We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, because the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.

I still believe that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but nobody is going to do the hard bending, if not you and me. It’s our choice, and I have always believed we must choose each other.

It all suddenly seemed like a hopeless fight, but so what? I told myself. What does it cost you to pretend that the can change (for the better)? That history is an arc and it bends toward justice, even if it is long?

Faith is the belief that certain outcomes will happen, and hope is the belief that certain outcomes can happen. So when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. says, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice," he is speaking from a place of faith. He is confident that justice is inevitable, even if it may come in another lifetime. Faith is often rooted in the belief of a higher power, in God. Hope on the other hand would mean reframing the statement to say, "The arc of the moral universe is long, and it will bend toward justice, if we bend it. Faith is rooted in certainty, hope is rooted in possibility, and they both require their own different kinds of work.

the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Change takes a long time, but it does happen. ... Each of us who works for social change is part of the mosaic of all who work for justice; together we can accomplish multitudes.

At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. 'We once met many years ago,' he said. 'And you knew and befriended my father.' My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. 'My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argentina.' In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest, in Dr. King’s phrase as often cited by President Obama, that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends toward justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry. It was also something more than a nudge to my memory. There was a time when the name of Jacobo Timerman, the kidnapped and tortured editor of the newspaper La Opinion in Buenos Aires, was a talismanic one. The mere mention of it was enough to elicit moans of obscene pleasure from every fascist south of the Rio Grande: finally in Argentina there was a strict ‘New Order’ that would stamp hard upon the international Communist-Jewish collusion. A little later, the mention of Timerman’s case was enough to derail the nomination of Ronald Reagan’s first nominee as undersecretary for human rights; a man who didn’t seem to have grasped the point that neo-Nazism was a problem for American values. And Timerman’s memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido: the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has been ‘disappeared.’ In the nuances of that past participle, many, many people vanished into a void that is still unimaginable. It became one of the keywords, along with escuadrone de la muerte or ‘death squads,’ of another arc, this time of radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent. Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison. I could italicize every second word in that last sentence without making it any more heart-stopping. And this subhuman character was boasted of, as a personal friend and genial host, even after he had been removed from the office he had defiled, by none other than Henry Kissinger. So there was an almost hygienic effect in meeting, in a new Washington, as an envoy of an elected government, the son of the brave man who had both survived and exposed the Videla tyranny.

O wind, songs have ye in her name? Plucked her did ye from midnight blasted millyard winds and made her renown ring in stone and brick and ice? Hard implacable bridges of iron cross her milk of brows? God bent from his steel arc welded her a hammer of honey and of balm? The rutted mud of hardrock Time . . . was it wetted, springified, greened, blossomied for me to grow in nameless bloodied lutey naming of her? Wood on cold trees would her coffin bare? Keys of stone rippled by icy streaks would ope my needy warm interiors and make her eat the soft sin of me? No iron bend or melt to make my rocky travail ease--I was all alone, my fate was banged behind an iron door, I'd come like butter looking for Hot Metals to love, I'd raise my feeble orgone bones and let them be rove and split the half and goop the big sad eyes to see it and say nothing. The laurel wreath is made of iron, and thorns of nails; acid spit, impossible mountains, and incomprehensible satires of blank humanity--congeal, cark, sink and seal my blood--

The arc of my dream, the curve of my desires, the hand on my wound. You move forward, shifting and fragile, in the sinuous possible interlacings. The regular and intangible arrow come from heaven guides me through it. It bends, curves, swells. Bounces, stops, restarts to the rhythm of my sighs. I follow it with my eyes as I follow your heart.

Zenosyne. It's actually just after you're born that life flashes before your eyes. Entire aeons are lived in those first few months when you feel inseparable from the world itself, with nothing to do but watch it passing by. At first, time is only felt vicariously, as something that happens to other people. You get used to living in the moment, because there's nowhere else to go. But soon enough, life begins to move, and you learn to move with it. And you take it for granted that you're a different person every year, Upgraded with a different body...a different future. You run around so fast, the world around you seems to stand still. Until a summer vacation can stretch on for an eternity. You feel time moving forward, learning its rhythm, but now and then it skips a beat, as if your birthday arrives one day earlier every year. We should consider the idea that youth is not actually wasted on the young. That their dramas are no more grand than they should be. That their emotions make perfect sense, once you adjust for inflation. For someone going through adolescence, life feels epic and tragic simply because it is: every kink in your day could easily warp the arc of your story. Because each year is worth a little less than the last. And with each birthday we circle back, and cross the same point around the sun. We wish each other many happy returns. But soon you feel the circle begin to tighten, and you realize it's a spiral, and you're already halfway through. As more of your day repeats itself, you begin to cast off deadweight, and feel the steady pull toward your center of gravity, the ballast of memories you hold onto, until it all seems to move under its own inertia. So even when you sit still, it feels like you're running somewhere. And even if tomorrow you will run a little faster, and stretch your arms a little farther, you'll still feel the seconds slipping away as you drift around the bend. Life is short. And life is long. But not in that order.

Elie Wiesel warned us that there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. Maria’s legacy will be felt for generations—because she never failed to protest, to try to bend the arc of history toward justice. And when young Filipino students study history, they will find that the first Filipino person ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was a courageous journalist determined to tell the truth. I hope that, for the sake of future generations, they will be inspired by her example.

America can restore the soul of its political system. We can once again illuminate a pathway for others onto the vaunted plazas of open society. If, however, we shrink from the task, our names will be recorded by history as those who didn’t pass the torch but let its light expire. That is my warning. Every American generation before us faced and passed this test. Our charge is to do the same, proving that the United States can do what other civilizations could not—survive the ages—and bend the arc of the moral universe toward the value that is the real sinew of civic life: freedom. Let’s roll.

The long sweep of America has been defined by two forward motions: one force widening the embrace of Black Americans and another force maintaining or widening their exclusion. The duel between these two forces represents the duel at the heart of America’s racial history. The myth of singular racial progress veils this conflict—and it veils the snowballing racism behind Black people today still weathering the highest unemployment and incarceration rates and the lowest life expectancy and median wealth compared to other racial groups. Until Americans replace mythology with history, until Americans unveil and halt the progression of racism, an arc of the American universe will keep bending toward injustice.

I wrote about a place called Alki Beach. When I had first crossed the bridge into West Seattle, I could see the city skyline over Puget Sound. I stood on a strip of purple-gray beach sand. A pier house sold hairy mussels and one-hour bike rentals. Copper and metal signs whipped against the wind. Old couples toted bouquets under wooden pergolas. Those singing and strolling on the beach eventually curved around the bend toward the northern arc and out of sight. I wanted to live here by its waters, read its signs, admire the wind as one admires an old friend. The skyscrapers across the water might be a bracelet across my wrist—the Ferris wheel, city stadium, ships in the harbor. I had never known that joy was a practice the way poetry was a practice. Somebody asked if they could

The arc of the moral universe is indeed long but it does bend toward justice. At the root of all this of course is the trade. As he always calls it. His craft is the oldest there is. Among man's gifts it is older than fire and in the end he is the final steward, the final custodian. When the last gimcrack has swallowed up its last pale creator he will be out there, prefering the sun, trying the temper of his trowel. Placing stone on stone in accordance with the laws of God. The trade was all they had, the old masons. They understood it both in its utility and its secret nature. We couldn't read nor write, he says. But it was not in any book. We kept it close to our hearts. We kept it close to our hearts and it was like a power and we knew it would not fail us. We knew that it was a thing that if we had it they could not take it from us and it would stand by us and not fail us. Not ever fail us.

The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.

Masha, I know you think that the ‘struggle for justice’ is a corny fantasy, but you live in a world where people have weekends, don’t get maimed on the job, and have constitutional rights, at least some of the time. You live in a world where I’m not someone’s property, where I can vote, where I can marry a woman or a man. That’s because sometimes, the struggle for justice gets somewhere. Do you know how that happens? Do you have a theory of change?” I shrugged. “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice?” She made a fart noise. “You know what makes it bend, Masha? People hauling on that mother, with all their strength, with all their lives. We pull and pull and pull, and then, bit by bit, it bends. People hear Dr. King’s quote and they think, oh, well, if the arc of history is going to bend toward justice then all we have to do is sit back and wait for it. But the truth is, it bends because we make it bend, and the instant we let up, even a little, it snaps back.

One solution might be to liken the path of the light beam through a changing gravitational field to that of a line drawn on a sphere or on a surface that is warped. In such cases, the shortest line between two points is curved, a geodesic like a great arc or a great circle route on our globe. Perhaps the bending of light meant that the fabric of space, through which the light beam traveled, was curved by gravity. The shortest path through a region of space that is curved by gravity might seem quite different from the straight lines of Euclidean geometry. There was another clue that a new form of geometry might be needed. It became apparent to Einstein when he considered the case of a rotating disk. As a disk whirled around, its circumference would be contracted in the direction of its motion when observed from the reference frame of a person not rotating with it. The diameter of the circle, however, would not undergo any contraction. Thus, the ratio of the disk’s circumference to its diameter would no longer be given by pi. Euclidean geometry wouldn’t apply to such cases. Rotating motion is a form of acceleration, because at every moment a point on the rim is undergoing a change in direction, which means that its velocity (a combination of speed and direction) is undergoing a change. Because non-Euclidean geometry would be necessary to describe this type of acceleration, according to the equivalence principle, it would be needed for gravitation as well.

We chose not to discuss a world warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps; or simple fear; or fear of fearmongering; or technocratic faith, which is really market faith; or deference to partisan debates or even partisan priorities; or skepticism about the environmental Left of the kind I'd always had; or disinterest in the fates of distant ecosystems like I'd also always had. We felt confusion about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an intuition that others would e easily confused about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers. we suffered from slowness apprehending the speed of change, or semi-conspiratorial confidence in the responsibility of global elites and their institutions, or obeisance toward those elites and their institutions, whatever we thought of them. Perhaps we felt unable to really trust scarier projections because we'd only just heard about warming, we thought, and things couldn't possibly have gotten that much worse just since the first Inconvenient Truth; or because we liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in every other way and didn't want to think too hard about that; or because we felt so "postindustrial" we couldn't believe we were still drawing material breaths from fossil fuel furnaces. Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted "normal," or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay. Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore nontribal it suggested only the corniest politics, because we didn't yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn't mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged. Because we had too much faith in the teleological shape of history and the arrow of human progress to countenance the idea that the arc of history would bend toward anything but environmental justice, too. Because when we were being really honest with ourselves we already thought of the world as a zero-sum resource competition and believed that whatever happened we were probably going to continue to be the victors, relatively speaking anyway, advantages of class being what they are and our own luck in the natalist lottery being what it was. Perhaps we were too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about the future of jobs and industry; or perhaps we were also really afraid of robots or were too busy looking at our new phones; or perhaps, however easy we found the apocalypse reflex in our culture and the path of panic in our politics, we truly had a good-news bias when it came to the big picture; or, really, who knows why-there are so many aspects to the climate kaleidoscope that transforms our intuitions about environmental devastation into n uncanny complacency that it can be hard to pull the whole picture of climate distortion into focus. But we simply wouldn't, or couldn't, or anyway didn't look squarely in the face of science.

Sheridan’s eyes fell to the watery gateway as he begrudgingly donned the novel wetsuit and pulled on the crown of arc lamps. Following Kunchen’s lead, he cinched it tightly around his waist, feet, and neck. And all the while his eyes returned to the teeming portal. Kunchen took notice. “This whirlpool is like the mighty river of life.” Kunchen said. Sheridan watched as Kunchen dipped his right hand into a shallow pool of ice-crusted water, scooping up the pristine liquid in his cupped fingers. He submitted the handful of water to Sheridan. With the gentle tilt of his right hand he poured it out, watching it trickle into his left hand. With unerring kindness in his eyes, Kunchen became the teacher and Sheridan the pupil: “Observe the water. It is soft, easily bending and transforming to its circumstance.” He poured the water from his left hand. It fell into the writhing water and disappeared in an instant. “But when it joins with the force of the whirlpool it becomes powerful and unstoppable. You must be flexible like the water, feeling the flow of life, tapping into its current. This is the only way.

the Enlightenment dream of inevitable human progress, grounded in the claim that we are all born free and equal in dignity and rights, and premised on hope that the arc of history bends toward justice, is now in tatters.

Martin Luther King said that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. The same could be said for the arc of American history. It also bends toward reason, and sanity. But it’s a slow, slow bend. And with every movement forward, dumb America has shrieked and howled like a wounded animal. Since

Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.

Then, swiftly, came the unthinkable: smart, well-meaning people unable to distinguish simple truth from viral misinformation; a pop-culture punch line ascending to the presidency; neo-Nazis marching, unmasked, through several American cities. This wasn’t the kind of disruption anyone had envisioned. There had been a serious miscalculation. We like to assume that the arc of history will bend inexorably toward justice, but this is wishful thinking. Nobody, not even Martin Luther King Jr., believed that social progress was automatic; if he did, he wouldn’t have bothered marching across any bridges. The arc of history bends the way people bend it.

The moral arc of our lives bends toward meaning--especially if we bend it that way with all our damn might.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was fond of paraphrasing a quote that originated with a nineteenth-century minister, Theodore Parker. King would say, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Martin Luther King said 'The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice'. Given that in human prehistory we lived in remarkably equal societies, maintaining a steady state - or sustainable - way of life in what some have called 'the original affluent society', it is perhaps right to think of it as an arc, curving back to the very basic human principles of fairness and equality which we still regard as good manners in any normal social interaction.

we can and must bend the arc of the moral universe—toward both justice and unity.

The arc of reason bends to heaven. The darkness of a few can force hell.

The moral arc of our life bends toward meaning- especially if we bend it that way with all our damn might.

The Archbishop often liked to quote one of his heroes, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in turn was quoting one of his heroes, an abolitionist minister named Theodore Parker, who said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

The stars rise, the moon bends her arc, Each glowworm winks her spark

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble. The

Etymologically, a homestead is a home place, the focus of a story. And the word "home" derives from the ancient root for bed or couch, the place where we lie down to rest. The journey begins, then, in repose, unconsciousness, or sleep. We go out to awaken, hoping to return both wiser and more refreshed. The path soars outward, then bends back, inscribing its parabolic arc.

The arc of the club head has been lengthened by virtue of the right arm bend, the concurrent raising of the extended left arm, and the vertical hinging of the wrists at the base of the thumbs. If you have achieved this position correctly, the club shaft will rest on your left thumb. Your elbows will be fairly close together. The right elbow will point toward the ground. Raising the right elbow too high results in an overswing which sets up disconnection and the hit impulse. Neither does the right elbow move out

I believe you,” he said, gently; “there arc sensitive plants, so fresh and fair, that it is a sin they should ever have to shiver in rude hands, and learn to bend with the world’s breath. But live as long as we have, and you will know that the deep feeling of which you are thinking is never found in unison with the poetic and drivelling sentiment we ridicule. Boys’ sorrows vent themselves in words — men’s griefs are voiceless. If ever you feel — pray God you never may — vital suffering, you will find that it will never seek solace in confidences, never lament itself, but rather hug its torture closer, as the Spartan child hugged the fierce wolf-fangs. You will find the difference between the fictitious sorrows which run abroad proclaiming their own wrongs; and the grief which lies next the heart night and day, and, like the iron cross of the Romish priest, eats it slowly, but none the less surely, away.

The arc of the moral universe is long, and it bends toward justice.

There is a fragility to life now that nearly breaks me, one I could handle as a child and as an adult but not as a mother. Children force you to envision the future, and doing that today is an act of mental violence. But children also force you to fight for the future—to insist that there will be one, to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice through sheer force of will, because it sure as hell doesn’t bend that way on its own.

The moral arc of our life bends toward meaning—especially if we bend it that way with all our damn might.

Sometimes, reading the news feels like an onslaught of negativity, but the truth is that the human race gets a little less violent every year. We get a little better all the time. And the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

No eye for an eye, no matter what. Especially historical justice, or climate justice. But over the long haul, in some rough sense, that’s what we have to try for. That’s what our ministry is about. We’re trying to set things up so that in the future, over the long haul, something like justice will get created. Some long-term ledger of more good than bad. Bending the arc and all that. No matter what happened before, that’s what we can do now.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in turn was quoting one of his heroes, an abolitionist minister named Theodore Parker, who said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

When you are someone like me, you can't get to the top without bending the rules because the rules are meant to keep you at the bottom.

It's so funny how many people today really believe themselves to be the most advanced people who ever lived, 'the arc of history bending towards justice' or whatever the quote is. To me, being attendant to history is a kind of resistance. It offers the possibility of alternative worlds, that there is a reality outside the one we are living in.

Not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could. Women saw him and wanted to weep - to tell him that their chest hurt and their knees did too. Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other: that way past the Change of Life, desire in them had suddenly become enormous, greedy, more savage than when they were fifteen, and that it embarrassed them and made them sad; that secretly they longed to die - to be quit of it - that sleep was more precious to them than any waking day... Behind her, bending down, his body an arc of kindness, he held her breasts in the palms of his hands. He rubbed his cheek on her back and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches.

the Bible’s ethical arc clearly bends toward total nonviolence. It heads in that direction the entire time, from creation all the way to the end of the NT. It’s the story of God creating a nonviolent world, humans corrupting it with violence, and God beginning to work with humankind to return it to its originally intended nonviolent state.

The arc of our evolutionary history is long. But it bends towards goodness

To suggest that we look to the past, to Freud and Lacan, in order to find a new ethical code may seem counterintuitive, but when capital reterritorializes the psyche into systems based on their compatibility with viral market shares of the mental health topographical map, it is hard to argue for an ever-forward, arc of history that always bends toward justice. This is where ethics must come into play.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” When seen over short stretches, it seems that history repeats, that racism and militant nationalism erupt periodically in the world to sow hatred and spawn conflict. Yet the society that experiences these movements is not the same, it trends toward being more tolerant, more respectful, and more just. Around that trend line, we do go up and down. We may be down today, and we have a long way to go, but the distance we have come should give us hope. Let us not let the future surprise us. Instead, let us shape it.

arc of the moral universe bends toward justice,

I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to convey that all ends up fine in the end. But there is no solace in rearranging language to make a different word tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe does not bend in a direction that comforts us.

In fact, the events Obama referenced were not hopes or ripples, but actions. During his presidency he helped popularize the quotation, which was born of a nineteenth-century Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, and paraphrased by Martin Luther King Jr., “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I say that it doesn’t simply bend as a consequence of natural progression; it must be bent, with great force and at great cost. And, I say that the time for hoping and waiting, as a political strategy among Black people, must end. The path to power and relief from racial oppression is before us. We need to take it.

arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

They had grown up with a constant stream of global warming and gun violence burbling on low from their parents’ radios as they were driven to and from soccer or clarinet. Their lives, for the most part (at least the majority of students who attended this liberal and very expensive college), were cloaked in the postmillennial blanket of peace and prosperity, while terrible threats loomed in the shadowy corners of the larger world. They were overpraised and overpressured. There were teenage billionaires, twelve-year-old YouTube stars, and no jobs for them once they graduated. Once Trump became president, the illusion, the one imparted to them comfortably from the driver’s seat of a minivan, the idea that the world would slowly get better, that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” was upended.

We can encode all of this into a phrase: history is a cryptic epic of twisting trajectories. Cryptic, because the narrators are unreliable and often intentionally misleading. Epic, because the timescales are so long that you have to consciously sample beyond your own experience and beyond any human lifetime to see patterns. Twisting, because there are curves, cycles, collapses, and non-straightforward patterns. And trajectories, because history is ultimately about the time evolution of human beings, which maps to the physical idea of a dynamical system, of a set of particles progressing through time. Put that together, and it wipes out both the base-rater’s view that today’s order will remain basically stable over the short-term, and the complementary view of a long-term “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

The moral arc of the universe will continue to bend toward justice, but it will need a lot more help from all of us in doing so.

We are responsible for our behavior, not that of our group, nor that of our ancestors. The arc of the universe does indeed bend toward justice, as King claimed, and we thus dishonor the sacrifices of our forebears when we suggest things are as bad or worse today than before the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Maybe there’s no such thing as justice, in the sense of some kind of real reparation of a wrong. No eye for an eye, no matter what. Especially historical justice, or climate justice. But over the long haul, in some rough sense, that’s what we have to try for. That’s what our ministry is about. We’re trying to set things up so that in the future, over the long haul, something like justice will get created. Some long-term ledger of more good than bad. Bending the arc and all that. No matter what happened before, that’s what we can do now.

Irena heard a faint cry – a strange mournful sound, like a mewling cat, muffled and hitching. A shadow moved along the wall – a woman wrapped in brown and gray rags like condensed smoke – holding a swaddled infant in the crook of her elbow. The woman stooped to pick up a small rock and heaved it over the wall, then retreated to crouch in the shadows. A moment later the same rock arched back over the wall from the Aryan side, and the woman stood up with intent, holding her bundle close to her chest and face. Even at this distance, Irena heard the woman suck two deep breaths, bend forward, swing her baby in both her arms, three times, and then with blazing purpose hurl it up in an arc that barely cleared the jagged glass atop the wall. No sound came back from the other side. The woman collapsed against the wall, her hands stroking the bricks, the two inches that separated her from her baby. She slunk away in the shadow of the wall.

What do grown-up people know about the things boys are afraid of? Oh, hickory switches and such like, they know that. But what about what goes on in their minds when they have to come home alone at night through the lonesome places? What do they know about lonesome places where no light from the street-corner ever comes? What do they know about a place and time when a boy is very small and very alone, and the night is as big as the town, and the darkness is the whole world? When grown-ups are big, old people who cannot understand anything, no matter how plain? A boy looks up and out, but he can't look very far when the trees bend down over and press close, when the sheds rear up along one side and the trees on the other, when the darkness lies like a cloud along the sidewalk and the arc-lights are far, far away. No wonder then that Things grow in that dark place near the grain elevator. No wonder a boy runs like the wind until his heartbeats sound like a drum and push up to suffocate him.

The Archbishop often liked to quote one of his heroes, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in turn was quoting one of his heroes, an abolitionist minister named Theodore Parker, who said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” “Perhaps

Nearly every therapist I know is feeling personal stress and is dealing with clients whose reactions range from reliving experiences of being bullied to fears of deportation to a sense that the arc of the moral universe no longer seems to bend inevitably toward justice. We’re seeing families and friendships fracture along political lines.

Rumor’s the slut you bend over a chair and never see again. Truth’s the lady you wed.

We like to view this country as a unified, cohesive whole based on progress, a perpetual refinement of values, and an arc of history bending toward justice—but the prevalence of ghosts suggests otherwise. The ghosts who haunt our woods, our cemeteries, our houses, and our cities appear at moments of anxiety and point to instability in our national and local identities.

The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, but sometimes the universe needs a little help. It

Regularly this quote is whittled down to “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice” by those who speak of a manmade redemption in which Jesus is just another “good teacher”; they promise to identify and end injustices on human terms.

she knows why she hasn’t left: because she believed that things would change. That they would get better. She wasn’t sure why—she just thought it would. Such an idea had been engraved in her mind since childhood: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. It is the American story, or so she thought. Yet she’s realized all too late that it is exactly that—a story. An idea, a fiction, or maybe even a piece of propaganda designed to keep her here and quiet. Perhaps change isn’t always slow and incrementally positive. Perhaps it can be fast, and for the worse. Perhaps things will never get better. Perhaps the present is also the future.