Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.
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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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Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable.
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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.
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Great people aren't those who are happy at times of convienience and content, but of how they are in times of catastrophy and controversy.
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Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy five and yet not ever truly to have lived.
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The church must be reminded that it is not the master, or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.
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What good does it do to sit at the counter when you cannot afford a hamburger?
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There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminates even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good.
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True sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.
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Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it.
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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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As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery.
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[People] don't see that there's a great deal of a difference between nonresistance to evil and nonviolent resistance.
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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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Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
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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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[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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A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man's social conditions....A ny religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.
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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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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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We know nothing about Africa, although our roots are there in terms of our forbearers. But I mean as far as the average Negro today, he knows nothing about Africa. And I think he's got to face the fact that he is an American, his culture is basically American, and one becomes adjusted to this when he realizes what, what he is.
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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.