Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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Some things are right, whether nobody sees you doing them or not.
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You can kill the dreamer, but you can't kill the dream.
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There are two types of laws: there are just laws and there are unjust laws... What is the difference between the two?...An unjust law is a man-made code that is out of harmony with the moral law.
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If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets as Raphael painted pictures, sweep streets as Michelangelo carved marble, sweep streets as Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
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A right delayed is a right denied.
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If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws.
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All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
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I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.
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We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.
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Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.
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We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
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Set yourself earnestly to discover what you are made to do, and then give yourself passionately to the doing of it.
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The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.
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I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government.... There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that would praise you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark,' but will curse and damn you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children!' There is something wrong with that press.
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Unearned suffering is redemptive.
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[Malcolm X] had said a great deal about nonviolence, criticizing nonviolence, and saying that I approved of Negro men and women being bitten by dogs and the fire hoses, and I say, say go on and not defend yourself. I think this kind of response grew out of the build up, all of the talk about my being a sort of polished Uncle Tom.
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I have condemned any organizer of war, regardless of his rank or nationality.
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I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism.
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Man must never be treated as a means to the end of the state, but always as an end within himself.
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True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.
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And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
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Justice denied anywhere diminishes justice everywhere.
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We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters.
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When we see social relationships controlled everywhere by the principles which Jesus illustrated in life -- trust, love, mercy, and altruism -- then we shall know that the kingdom of God is here.