Daily Inspiration Quote by Martin Luther King Jr.

King weaponizes a familiar Bible story to indict a very modern habit: treating morality as a personal risk assessment. By putting crisp, almost bureaucratic language in the mouths of the priest and Levite, he makes their failure feel less like cartoonish evil and more like something frighteningly normal. They don’t hate the injured man; they just run the cost-benefit analysis that keeps reputations intact and bodies safe. The sin is prudence masquerading as piety.

Then comes the pivot, and it’s pure King: a reversible question that flips the moral center of gravity. The Samaritan’s ethic isn’t sentimental; it’s structural. The story’s scandal has always been that the hero is the outsider, the person religious society has already decided is suspect. King leans into that subtext to argue that compassion is not owned by institutions, and that “respectability” can be a convenient cover for cowardice.

Context sharpens the blade. In the civil rights era, plenty of clergy and moderates sympathized with the cause while warning about timing, backlash, career consequences, donor displeasure, police hostility. King translates that caution into the priest’s and Levite’s anxious question: what will happen to me if I get involved? It’s a challenge to the bystander more than to the overt racist. He’s telling his audience that neutrality isn’t neutral; it’s a choice that predictably harms the vulnerable. The line works because it turns ethics into a mirror: not “Are you kind?” but “Whose safety is your morality protecting?”