Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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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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At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
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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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Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.
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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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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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If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
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If you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl, but keep moving forward!
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The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning...they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay.
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Education without morals is like a ship without a compass, merely wandering nowhere.
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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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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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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.
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Riots are the voices of the unheard.
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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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The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in the form of a Copernican revolution or a Darwinian theory of natural selection, were not mischievous men but misinformed men. And so Christ's words from the cross are written in sharp-edged terms across some of the most inexpressible tragedies of history: 'They know not what they do'.
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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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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.