Daily Inspiration Quote by Coretta Scott King

Hate is framed here not as a moral failing but as bad physics: dead weight that drags the carrier down. Coretta Scott King’s phrasing is deliberately practical. “Burden” shifts the debate from righteous anger to cost-benefit. It’s a word from the daily ledger of bodies and lives - who gets to rest, who has to keep hauling. By the time she lands on “it injures the hater,” the sentence has already set up hate as a self-administered wound, a kind of poison you mistake for armor.

The subtext is political discipline. In the civil rights movement’s long aftermath, hatred was an understandable response, even a tempting one. King doesn’t deny its intensity; she denies its usefulness. “Too great” concedes the feeling’s scale while warning that indulging it will hollow out the very people trying to survive and build. Hate consumes attention, corrodes judgment, turns organizing into obsession, and makes opponents the center of your inner life. The hated may be harmed, but they also get a perverse power: they live rent-free.

There’s also an implicit rebuke to America’s mythology of “justified” resentment. Coming from an activist who carried both public grief and private loss, the line rejects the romance of bitterness. It’s not sanctimony; it’s strategy and self-preservation. Nonviolence, in this reading, isn’t sweetness. It’s refusing to let oppression recruit your nervous system as its second battleground.