Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable.
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We come humbly to say to the men in the forefront of our government that the civil rights issue is not an Ephemeral, evanescent domestic issue that can be kicked about by reactionary guardians of the status quo; it is rather an eternal moral issue which may well determine the destiny of our nation in the ideological struggle with communism. The hour is late. The clock of destiny is ticking out. We must act now, before it is too late.
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In the current struggle, there is one positive course of action. There is no alternative, for the alternative would connote a rear march.
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We cannot be truly Christian people so long as we flaunt the central teachings of Jesus: brotherly love and the Golden Rule.
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Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
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I just want to leave a committed life behind.
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Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
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In this world is a God whose matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man.
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Let's build bridges, not walls.
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To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.
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As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free.
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We must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers .
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It is a strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
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The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible.
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There is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.
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If we do an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we will be a blind and toothless nation.
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Courage faces fear and thereby masters it.
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If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values - that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.
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Be an artist at whatever you do. Even if you are a street sweeper, be the Michelangelo of street sweepers.
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If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.
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There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.
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If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody he's traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain.
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In the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and, ultimately, destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.
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We must substitute courage for caution.