Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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We must substitute courage for caution.
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I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction... I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow... I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed.
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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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The thing that we need in the world today, is a group of men and women who will stand up for right and be opposed to wrong, wherever it is. A group of people who have come to see that some things are wrong, whether they’re never caught up with. Some things are right, whether nobody sees you doing them or not.
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This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.
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A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.
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A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.
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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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America, you must be born again!
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They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and 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. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
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In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.
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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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We must shift the arms race into a 'peace race'.
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The body is God's temple, but we are to worship God, not the temple.
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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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Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
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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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Even when the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference.... In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.
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Courage is an inner resolution to go forward despite obstacles; Cowardice is submissive surrender to circumstances.
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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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Love is a usually force able of transforming an rivalry into friend.
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Brutality was imprisoned in a lumious glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.
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Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? - "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free."
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The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live.