We come to see that there is within every man, the image of God, and no matter how much it is scarred, it is still there. And so, when we come to recognize that the evil act of our enemy neighbor is not the whole being or our enemy neighbor, we develop the capacity to love him in spite of his evil deed. The other think that we must do in order to love the enemy is this: we must seek at all times to win his friendship and understanding rather than to defeat him or humiliate him. There may come a time when it will be possible for you to humiliate your worst enemy or even to defeat him, but in order to love the enemy, you must not do it. For in the final analysis, love means understanding goodwill for all men and a refusal to defeat any individual…Love makes it possible for you to place your vision and to center your activity on the evil system and not the individual enemy who may be caught up in that system. And so, you set out to defeat segregation and not the segregationist.
Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” March 7, 1961, quoted in James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity, 200-201.