Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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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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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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So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind - it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact - I can only submit to the edict of others.
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All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
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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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Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
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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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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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Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Many of our inner conflicts are rooted in hate. This is why the psychiatrists say, "Love or perish." Hate is too great a burden to bear.
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Make no mistake about those who call themselves anti Zionist are anti Semitic.
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You can have no influence over those for whom you have underlying contempt.
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Education without morals is like a ship without a compass, merely wandering nowhere.
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Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
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Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.
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A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
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I've decided to stick with love.
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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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Riots are the voices of the unheard.
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A man who has nothing he is willing to die for has nothing worth living for.
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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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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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I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the world. It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism.
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"I criticize America because I love her. I want her to stand as a moral example to the world."
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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.