Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned tho' we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny.
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I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.
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I've told the kids in the ghettos that violence won't solve their problems, but then they ask me, and rightly so; "Why does the government use massive doses of violence to bring about the change it wants in the world?" After this I knew that I could no longer speak against the violence in the ghettos without also speaking against the violence of my government.
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There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest.
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Every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God.
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To have serpentlike qualities devoid of dovelike qualities is to be passionless, mean, and selfish.
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We must work passionately and unrelentingly for the goal of freedom, but we must be sure that our hands are clean in the struggle. We must never struggle with falsehood, hate, or malice. We must never become bitter.
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We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.
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The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community. A boycott is never an end within itself. It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor but the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption.
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It is a strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
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Don't let anybody make you think God chose America as His divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.
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Your self-image should not come from the job you do but from how well you do your job.
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I just want to do God’s will.
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My obligation is to do the right thing. The rest is in God's hands.
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There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.
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Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.
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I was convinced that worship at its best is a social experience with people of all levels of life coming together to realize their oneness and unity under God. Whenever the church, consciously or unconsciously, caters to one class it loses the spiritual force of the "whosoever will, let him come, doctrine and is in danger of becoming a little more than a social club with a thin veneer of religiosity."
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Every man is somebody because he is a child of God.
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Slaves do not always welcome their deliverers. They become accustomed to being slaves. They would rather gear those ills they have.
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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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The white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education. In one sense it is more evil for them because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.
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There is no easy way to create a world where men and women can live together... But if such a world is created in our lifetime, it will be done by rejecting the racism, materialism, and violence that has characterized Western civilization and especially by working toward a world of brotherhood, cooperation, and peace.
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Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.
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The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.