Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.
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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.
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I don't think you can be in public life without being called bad names.
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To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.
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Slavery in America was perpetuated not merely by human badness but also by human blindness. ... Men convinced themselves that a system that was so economically profitable must be morally justifiable. ... Science was commandeered to prove the biological inferiority of the Negro. Even philosophical logic was manipulated [exemplified by] an Aristotlian syllogism: All men are made in the image of God; God, as everyone knows, is not a Negro; Therefore, the Negro is not a man.
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Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you're nobody.
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With the tough mind, there must also be a tender heart.
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The conservatives who say, "Let us not move so fast," and the extremists who say, "Let us go out and whip the world ," would tell you that they are as far apart as the poles. But there is a striking parallel: They accomplish nothing; for they do not reach the people who have a crying need to be free.
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Where evil men would seek to perpetuate an unjust status quo, good men must seek to bring into being a real order of justice.
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People with good intentions but limited understanding are more dangerous than people with total ill will.
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We were not unmindful of the difficulties involved. So we decided to go through a process of self-purification.
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Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy five and yet not ever truly to have lived.
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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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Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.
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In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action.
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Truth crushed to earth will rise again.
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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.
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We know nothing about Africa, although our roots are there in terms of our forbearers. But I mean as far as the average Negro today, he knows nothing about Africa. And I think he's got to face the fact that he is an American, his culture is basically American, and one becomes adjusted to this when he realizes what, what he is.
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I think that we've got to come to see this. The Negro is an American.
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Whatever effects one directly, effects all indirectly.
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Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical realist.
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There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminates even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good.
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Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half of the world.