Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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Be The Peace You Wish To See In The World!
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Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.
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Many men cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace.
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Is your heart right? If your heart isn't right, fix it up today.
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My mommy always said there were no monsters - no real ones - but there are.
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I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government.... There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that would praise you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark,' but will curse and damn you when you say, 'Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children!' There is something wrong with that press.
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What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?
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True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.
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Today, is a great day to make a difference for someone. 'I have a dream'.
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The ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable.
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Slavery in America was perpetuated not merely by human badness but also by human blindness. ... Men convinced themselves that a system that was so economically profitable must be morally justifiable. ... Science was commandeered to prove the biological inferiority of the Negro. Even philosophical logic was manipulated [exemplified by] an Aristotlian syllogism: All men are made in the image of God; God, as everyone knows, is not a Negro; Therefore, the Negro is not a man.
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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'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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We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust.
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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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Your self-sacrificing devotion to your purpose in life and your unwavering faith will carry you through times of difficulty.
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Liberalism provided me with an intellectual satisfaction that I never found in fundamentalism. I became so enamored of the insights of liberalism that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything it encompassed.
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Voting is the foundation stone for political action.
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A right delayed is a right denied.
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The body is God's temple, but we are to worship God, not the temple.
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And violence is impractical, because the old eye for an eye philosophy ends up leaving everybody blind .. It is immoral because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for everybody. Means and ends are inseparable. The means represent the ideal in the making; in the long run of history destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.
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Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.
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Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
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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.