— Martin Luther King Jr., college addresses, 1964-65; earlier form, Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963
About this quote
हिन्दी में
जो सही है, उसे करने के लिए समय सदा ही सही होता है।
What it means
The sentence is built as a reply, not as an exhortation. Someone has said not yet — and the answer uses the word right twice in two different senses to argue that there is no second question. If the act is right, the clock supplies no further information. Timing, in this construction, is not a separate variable you get to weigh; it has been collapsed into the moral question and disappears.
Worth keeping because of how narrow and how strong that is. It does not claim every hour is equally convenient, effective, or safe — only that none of those are objections to rightness. It is usually reproduced as ordinary anti-procrastination advice, which loses the edge: the line’s actual target is the sympathetic delayer, the person who agrees with you about the goal and asks only for patience.
What it teaches you
Next time you or someone else defers something on grounds of timing, force the vague claim into a specific one: what will be different later, who will have moved, and what is the date. If there is no answer, not now was carrying a different meaning — usually not ever, or I would rather not be the one. The line does not tell you to act rashly; it tells you that unspecified timing is not a reason, and that you can test it in one question.
अर्थ और सीख
यह वाक्य किसी उपदेश से ज़्यादा एक उत्तर है — उनके लिए जो कहते हैं ‘अभी नहीं’। इसमें ‘सही’ दो अर्थों में आया है, और तर्क यही है कि जब काम सही है तो समय का सवाल अलग से बचता ही नहीं। सीख: जब कोई देरी की वजह ‘समय ठीक नहीं’ बताए, तो पूछिए कि आगे ठीक-ठीक क्या बदलेगा और कब — जवाब न मिले तो असली वजह टालना है, समय नहीं।
Where it comes from
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used this line, in close variants, across the 1960s — notably in his 1964–65 college addresses, including ‘Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.’ In the 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail he had written the earlier form: ‘the time is always ripe to do right.’
