Justice & Law Quote by Martin Luther King Jr.

Retribution has a seductive clarity: you hurt me, I hurt you, balance restored. King takes that ancient moral math and exposes its endgame as collective ruin. “An eye for an eye” isn’t just criticized as unkind; it’s framed as self-defeating policy, a social technology that produces blindness on a mass scale. The line works because it flips the audience from righteousness to consequence. It’s not asking you to be saintly. It’s asking you to notice the bill that vengeance always sends.

Then King tightens the screw with a second sentence that refuses the favorite excuse of every cautious era: not yet. “The time is always right” is a direct rebuke to moderates who praised his goals while condemning his timing, the people who preferred “order” to justice and treated civil rights as an item to be scheduled. In 1963, when King wrote from a Birmingham jail cell and watched white clergy urge patience, “always” was a provocation: morality doesn’t wait for permission from comfort.

The subtext is strategic as much as spiritual. As a minister, King could speak in absolutes without sounding naive; the cadence carries biblical authority while serving a political doctrine of nonviolence. He isn’t denying anger or harm. He’s insisting that the moral high ground is also the practical high ground: retaliation multiplies injuries, while disciplined action breaks the cycle and forces the public to see what “blindness” really looks like.