Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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The negro cannot win the respect of the white people of the south or the peoples of the world if he is willing to sell the future of his children for his personal and immediate comfort and safety.
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Even in the inevitable moments when all seems hopeless, men know that without hope they cannot really live, and in agonizing desperation they cry for the bread of hope.
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But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
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A riot is the language of the unheard. On blacks in America; address at Birmingham AL.
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The body is God's temple, but we are to worship God, not the temple.
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My mommy always said there were no monsters - no real ones - but there are.
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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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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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I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.
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I'm very glad Christ tells us to love our neighbor and not to like our neighbor because it's hard to like someone threatening your children and throwing fire bombs through your window, but He asks us to love them and that I can do.
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It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for 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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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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Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity.
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I may be crucified for my beliefs and, if I am, you can say, "He died to make men free.
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In order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self.
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Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism... We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.
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Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny. To a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.
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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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When we rise in the morning... at the table we drink coffee which is provided to us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African; before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half the world.
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Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? - "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free."
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Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.
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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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I have a dream! To be free at last! Free at last! Free at last. And if a man has nothing to die for, Then his life is worth nothing.