Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
-
A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.
-
Without love, benevolence becomes egotism.
-
If your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi and nonviolence. But if your enemy has no conscience like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer.
-
If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
-
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.
-
There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust.
-
The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up.
-
If you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl, but keep moving forward!
-
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
-
At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
-
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.
-
I've decided to stick with love.
-
Though we live in the colony of time, we are ultimately responsible to the empire of eternity.
-
I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled.
-
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.
-
You can have no influence over those for whom you have underlying contempt.
-
All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
-
As we have seen, the first public expression of disenchantment with nonviolence arose around the question of 'self-defense.' In a sense this is a false issue, for the right to defend one's home and one's person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law.
-
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
-
Education without morals is like a ship without a compass, merely wandering nowhere.
-
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.