Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it.
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Quietly endure, silently suffer and patiently wait.
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There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer.
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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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The greatness of our God lies in the fact that [He] is both tough minded and tender hearted.
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If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue?
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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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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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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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There are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.
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The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.
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True sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.
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History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.
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We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. This may well be mankind's last chance to choose between chaos and community.
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Not everybody can be famous but everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.
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So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
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Every person must stand up and be accountable, but be responsible for their actions.
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All men are interdependent. Every nation is an heir of a vast treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead of all nations have contributed. Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally 'in the red.' We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women.
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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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We aren't going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.
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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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The first principle of value that we need to rediscover is this: that all reality hinges on moral foundations. In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws.
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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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Non-violent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored... I am not afraid of the word tension. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, and there is a type of constructive tension that is necessary for growth.