Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. 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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Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.
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It does not matter how long you live, but how well you do it.
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One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
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You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of the slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.
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In order to be true to one's conscience and true to God, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system.
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Like a boil that must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed to the light of human conscience before it can be cured.
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The whole world must see that Israel must exist and has the right to exist, and is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world.
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We as Christians have a mandate to be nonconformists.
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Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing.
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They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest.
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Our eternal message of hope is that dawn will come.
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Agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it's what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them.
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The Negro's problem will not be solved by running away.
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Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force.
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Friends are forever Boys are whatever.
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Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.
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The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.
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A right delayed is a right denied.
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O America, how you've taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.
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The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
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What the Negro wants - and will not stop until he gets - is absolute and unqualified freedom and equality here in this land of his birth, and not in Africa or in some imaginary state. The Negro no longer will be tolerant of anything less than his due right and heritage. He is pursuing only that which he knows is honorably his. He knows that he is right.
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I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.
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You can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.