Quotes About Unity

There is a great new work before us, which is to replace with true knowledge the ignorance that has destroyed human minds. We will construct unity in a world [which] has been brutally torn apart by false divisions of race, religion, gender, nationality, and age. We will heal with unconditional love those souls whose hearts have been disfigured by hatred and loneliness.

Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self.

We can gain a lot more striving for harmonious coexistence than we can by giving in to hate-filled rage and fear-driven ignorance.

An outrageous instinct to love and be loved blinded your arms to lines of propriety––Women and Men, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, white, black, red, brown. An outrageous instinct to love and be loved executed your brain every hour on the hour.

We knew how to combine our strengths in order to overcome our weaknesses, and how to live off faith when nothing else was available.

Whatever grace might 'trickle down' from the higher regions of a given society to the lower is no more essential than that which rises and converges from the opposite direction.

The story of the American Civil War is essentially one of human beings––Northerners, Southerners, Blacks, Whites, men, women–– holding themselves accountable for the future of a nation.

The only thing we knew for certain was the American Civil War was not a prelude to a kiss.

The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else's children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose.

Community makes us all. Secret society breaks us all.

A people may let a king fall, yet still remain a people, but if a king let his people slip from him, he is no longer a king.

I see the power of music to connect cultures. I see it when I stand on a stage at a bluegrass festival … and I bust out into a song in Chinese, and everybody's eyes just pop wide open.

We live as Ethiopians and die as Ethiopia.

Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.

The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one's own tradition with reverence for different traditions.

A prophet's true greatness is his ability to hold God and man in a single thought.

It is impossible, Bible in hand, to limit Christ's Church to one's own little community. It is everywhere, in all parts of the world; and whatever its external form, frequently changing, often impure, yet the gifts wherever received increase our riches.

Religion demands above all the concentration of the spirit...it is a thrusting into the unity of all things so as to come to grips in the hiddenness of the soul with the unity of the One from Whom it all comes.

When someone asked Abraham Lincoln, after he was elected president, what he was going to do about his enemies, he replied, "I am going to destroy them. I am going to make them my friends

With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right

If a house was on fire there could be but two parties. One in favor of putting out the fire. Another in favor of the house burning.

Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.

I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal.

The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.