Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in the form of a Copernican revolution or a Darwinian theory of natural selection, were not mischievous men but misinformed men. And so Christ's words from the cross are written in sharp-edged terms across some of the most inexpressible tragedies of history: 'They know not what they do'.
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Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil.
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...we must realize that a vast majority of believers are still searching and will continue to search for the being who is the "source of human good." Those who seek with clear heads and sincere hearts will in some measure find. Of course the true seeker will realize that there is no one way to find God. To be sure, there are many possible ways of finding God.
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Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
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Power is the ability to achieve purpose.
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Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.
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Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.
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We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.
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We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.
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Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Many of our inner conflicts are rooted in hate. This is why the psychiatrists say, "Love or perish." Hate is too great a burden to bear.
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Riots are the voices of the unheard.
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The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.
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"I criticize America because I love her. I want her to stand as a moral example to the world."
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Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated.
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Our generation will not have regretted both perverse crimes, and the eerie silence of the kind.
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Whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent.
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As we have seen, the first public expression of disenchantment with nonviolence arose around the question of 'self-defense.' In a sense this is a false issue, for the right to defend one's home and one's person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law.
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Everyone has an opportunity to be great because everyone has an opportunity to serve.
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The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning...they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay.
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I was not afraid of the words of the violent, but of the silence of the honest.
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It's not burn baby burn, but learn, baby, learn, so that you can earn, baby, earn.
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What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough-mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hard-heartedness?
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Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.
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The group consisting of mother, father and child is the main educational agency of mankind.