Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.
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The job of the school is to teach so well that family background is no longer an issue.
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Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
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Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
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It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-antirevolutionaries.
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My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.
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If our economic system is to survive, there has to be a better distribution of wealth ... we can't have a system where some people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.
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[Malcolm X] had said a great deal about nonviolence, criticizing nonviolence, and saying that I approved of Negro men and women being bitten by dogs and the fire hoses, and I say, say go on and not defend yourself. I think this kind of response grew out of the build up, all of the talk about my being a sort of polished Uncle Tom.
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If you have not discovered something you are willing to die for, then you are not fit to live.
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Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
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A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay.
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It is my hope that as the Negro plunges deeper into the quest for freedom and justice he will plunge even deeper into the philosophy of non-violence. The Negro all over the South must come to the point that he can say to his white brother: "We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we will not obey your evil laws. We will soon wear you down by pure capacity to suffer".
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We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society.
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Our goal is to create a beloved community," said Dr. King, "and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.
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There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest.
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Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. Not a few men who cherish lofty and noble ideals hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different.
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The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
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I just want to do God’s will.
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If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work.
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Music is the best consolation for a despaired man.
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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.
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Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
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It is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of high maturity, to rise to the level of self-criticism.
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An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.