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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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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Nonviolence is an imperative in order to bring about ultimate community.
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Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.
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Unearned suffering is redemptive.
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[E]very human life is a reflection of divinity, and... every act of injustice mars and defaces the image of God in man.
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A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once, the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared.
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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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Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody.
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And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?
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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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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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Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. Indeed, it is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.
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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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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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We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
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I have condemned any organizer of war, regardless of his rank or nationality.
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We who in 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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[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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A man can't ride your back unless it's bent.
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You cannot defect form an insight. You cannot unsee what you have seen.
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Lukewarm acceptance is more bewildering than outright rejection.
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Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.
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Justice denied anywhere diminishes justice everywhere.