Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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If your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi and nonviolence. But if your enemy has no conscience like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer.
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The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.
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Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up.
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We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany.
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At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
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Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
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Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'
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Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.
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If you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl, but keep moving forward!
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If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
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There are often multiple sources for some famous statements by King; as a professional speaker and minister he used some significant phrases with only slight variation many times in his essays, books, and his speeches to different audiences.
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A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world.
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The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
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The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.
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You can have no influence over those for whom you have underlying contempt.
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The universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship (angels). Behind the harsh appearance of the world there is a benign power.
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Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.
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If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.
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Education without morals is like a ship without a compass, merely wandering nowhere.
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A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.
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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.
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Injustice and corruption will never be transformed by keeping them hidden, but only by bringing them out into the light and confronting them with the power of love.
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Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil.
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It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.