Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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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 time has come for an all-out war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for "the least of these".
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If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue?
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But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.
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A Church that has lost its voice for justice is a Church that has lost its relevance in the world.
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I feel that when a white child goes to school only with white children, unconsciously that child grows up in many instances devoid of a world perspective. There is an unconscious provincialism, and it can develop into an unconscious superiority complex just as a Negro develops an unconscious inferiority complex.
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I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.
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Through nonviolent resistance the Negro will be able to rise to the noble height of opposing the unjust system while loving the perpetrators of the system.
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Whatever effects one directly, effects all indirectly.
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Without God, all of our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrise into the darkest of nights.
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These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
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Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it.
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If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.
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It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning.
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Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical realist.
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Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.
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Evil must be attacked by. . . the day to day assault of the battering rams of justice.
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Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.
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For years now I have heard the word "wait." It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never."
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My soul is too glad and too great to be at heart the enemy of any man.
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You can have no influence over those for whom you have underlying contempt.
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If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.
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Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another's flesh.
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I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea.