Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too small in quantity, but they are big in quality.
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There is such a thing as the freedom of exhaustion. Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up. [...] The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. [...] To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.
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The difference between a dreamer and a visionary is that a dreamer has his eyes closed and a visionary has his eyes open.
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Seeing is not always believing.
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Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.
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You cannot defect form an insight. You cannot unsee what you have seen.
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America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'
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It is hardly a moral act to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure.
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When the Negro finds the courage to be free, he faces dogs and guns and clubs and fire hoses totally unafraid, and the white men with those dogs, guns, clubs and fire hoses see that the Negro they have traditionally called "boy" has become a man.
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Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties.
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The Negro has no room to make any substantial compromises because his store of advantages is too small. He must press unrelentingly for quality, integrated education or his whole drive for freedom will be undermined by the absence of a most vital and indispensable element - learning.
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Ten cures for depression are to go out and do something for someone else and repeat it nine times.
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The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.
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Hate destroys the hater.
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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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Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.
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A woman can have a smile, and a woman can have a large backside, but I have been to the mountain and I am here to tell you that when a woman has both of those things she is not to be trusted.
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We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.
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Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.
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If you've got nothing worth dying for, you've got nothing worth living for.
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Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace.
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The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy... In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
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We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.
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One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ' an unjust law is no law at all.