Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political moral questions of our time.
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Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? - "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free."
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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 have an ultimate faith in America and an audacious faith in mankind.
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Nonviolence is a powerful as well as a just weapon. If you confront a man who has long been cruelly misusing you, and say, "Punish me, if you will; I do not deserve it, but I will accept it, so that the world will know I am right and you are wrong," then you wield a powerful and a just weapon. This man, your oppressor, is automatically morally defeated, and if he has any conscience, he is ashamed.
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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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When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
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The job of the school is to teach so well that family background is no longer an issue.
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Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
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The government can't make people love me, but it can keep them from lynching me.
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The decision we must make now is whether we will give our allegiance to outmoded and unjust customs or to the ethical demands of the universe. As Christians we owe our allegiance to God and His will, rather than to man and his folkways.
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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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In spite of its glowing talk about the welfare of the masses, Communism's methods and philosophy strip man of his dignity and worth, leaving him as little more than a depersonalized cog in the ever-turning wheel of the state.
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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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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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The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn't get written because someone knocked on the door.
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I said to my children, 'I'm going to work and do everything that I can do to see that you get a good education. I don't ever want you to forget that there are millions of God's children who will not and cannot get a good education, and I don't want you feeling that you are better than they are. For you will never be what you ought to be until they are what they ought to be.
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Love is the most durable power in the world. This creative force is the most potent instrument available in mankind's quest for peace and security.
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The body is God's temple, but we are to worship God, not the temple.
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Violence multiplies violence.
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The surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.
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In order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self.
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America, you must be born again!
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Love is a usually force able of transforming an rivalry into friend.