Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.
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Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.
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Without love, there is no reason to know anyone, for love will in the end connect us to our neighbors, our children and our hearts.
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I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human systems it falls victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.
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Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be the first in love. I want you to be the first in moral excellence. I want you to be the first in generosity.
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Just as it is the duty of all men to obey just laws, so it is the duty of all men to disobey unjust laws.
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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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We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can't reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.
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Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.
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Peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of order —in short, of government.
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A lie cannot live.
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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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A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.
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The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.
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Vanity asks, is it popular? Politics ask, will it work? But conscience and morality ask, is it right?
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We must pursue peaceful end through peaceful means.
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We must shift the arms race into a 'peace race'.
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Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you're nobody.
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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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If I knew that the world ends tomorrow, I, even today, plant a tree.
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Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual.
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We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights.
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We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.
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Personalism's insistence that only personality-finite and infinite-is ultimately real strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me metaphysical and philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality.