Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
-
The greatness of our God lies in the fact that [He] is both tough minded and tender hearted.
-
This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.
-
Seeing is not always believing.
-
Communism will never be defeated by atomic bombs. Our greatest defense against Communism is to take offensive action on behalf of justice and righteousness. We must seek to remove conditions of poverty, injustice, and racial discrimination.
-
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
-
The use of violence in our struggle would be both impractical and immoral. To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.
-
We as Christians have a mandate to be nonconformists.
-
Segregation, as even the segregationists know in their hearts, is morally wrong and sinful. If it weren't, the white South would not be haunted as it is by a deep sense of guilt for what it has done to the Negro - guilt for patronizing him, degrading him, brutalizing him, depersonalizing him, thingifying him; guilt for lying to itself. This is the source of the schizophrenia that the South will suffer until it goes through its crisis of conscience.
-
O America, how you've taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.
-
We know of no more crucial civil rights issue facing Congress today than the need to increase the federal minimum wage and extend its coverage.
-
I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.
-
It is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.
-
Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere.
-
One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying.
-
We must have our freedom now. We must have the right to vote. We must have equal protection of the law.
-
Nonviolence is absolute commitment to the way of love. Love is not emotional bash; it is not empty sentimentalism. It is the active outpouring of one's whole being into the being of another.
-
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
-
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed; We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.
-
Whatever effects one directly, effects all indirectly.
-
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
-
Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.
-
A riot is the language of the unheard.
-
It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning.
-
Had it not been for the ministry of my good friend Dr. Billy Graham, my work in the civil rights movement would not have been as successful as it has been.