No Victory Without Struggle

“There is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”
  
--Martin Luther King, Jr. 

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle."   

--Frederick Douglass 

 

"Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy.  In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon . . . suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration.  Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic.  A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.  It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs.  It (should be) his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crises."
"To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium.  However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health.  There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.  In the Nazi concentration camps . . . those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive.  I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, 'homeostasis,' i.e., a tensionless state.  What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.  What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him."  

--Viktor Frankl