Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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Not everybody can be famous but everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.
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Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus."
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Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical realist.
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Life's most persistent and urgent question is: what are you doing for others? Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.
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We can dream of an America, and a world, in which love and not money are civilization's bottom line.
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[Nonviolence] is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil.
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And I say to you, I have decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems. And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go. For I have seen too much hate... every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love.
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Don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.
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The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.
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[I]t must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this method because he is afraid or merely because he lacks the instruments of violence, he is not truly nonviolent. This is why Gandhi often said that if cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight.
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People with good intentions but limited understanding are more dangerous than people with total ill will.
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I decide on the basis of conscience. A genuine leader doesn't reflect consensus, he molds consensus.
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A second way that oppressed people sometimes deal with oppression is to resort to physical violence and corroding hatred.
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By...our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim; by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing...we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes.
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We must dispel the negative and harmful atmosphere that has been created by avaricious and unprincipled realtors who engage in "blockbusting." If we had in America really serious efforts to break down discrimination in housing, and at the same time a concerted program of government aid to improve housing for Negroes, I think that many white people would be surprised at how many Negroes would choose to live among themselves, exactly as Poles and Jews and other ethnic groups do.
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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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We must have our freedom now. We must have the right to vote. We must have equal protection of the law.
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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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I think the first reason that we should love our enemies, and I think this was at the very center of Jesus' thinking, is this: that hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe.
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It is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.
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Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say.
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There are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.
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Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
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We aren't going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.