Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
-
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.
-
Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing.
-
One of these days I'm going to put my body where my mind is.
-
The belief that God will do everything for man is as untenable as the belief that man can do everything for himself. It, too, is based on a lack of faith. We must learn that to expect God to do everything while we do nothing is not faith but superstition.
-
Violence often brings about momentary results.
-
O America, how you've taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.
-
Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.
-
I think the inconveniences of a segregated education are much greater than the inconveniences of busing students so that they can get an integrated quality education.
-
We as Christians have a mandate to be nonconformists.
-
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.
-
The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But, the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.
-
There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.
-
Like a boil that must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed to the light of human conscience before it can be cured.
-
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.
-
We must stand up and say, "I'm black and I'm beautiful," and this self-affirmation is the black man's need, made compelling by the white man's crimes against him.
-
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.
-
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
-
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.
-
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.
-
Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force.
-
Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
-
The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.
-
All men are interdependent. Every nation is an heir of a vast treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead of all nations have contributed. Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally 'in the red.' We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women.
-
Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.