Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
-
When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that society has cut off a segment of my freedom.
-
It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.
-
We must pursue peaceful end through peaceful means.
-
The purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
-
Right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.
-
People are often led to causes and often become committed to great ideas through persons who personify those ideas. They have to find the embodiment of the idea in flesh and blood in order to commit themselves to it.
-
The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.
-
Is your heart right? If your heart isn't right, fix it up today.
-
One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.
-
Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly.
-
The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.
-
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.
-
The potential beauty of human life is constantly made ugly by man's ever recurring song of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever rising tides of revenge. Man has never risen above the injunction of the lex talionis: "Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." In spite of the fact that the law of revenge solves no social problems, men continue to follow its disastrous leading. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path.
-
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.
-
Unless you have found something in life to live for that is more important to you than your own life, you will always be a slave. For all another man needs to do is threaten to take your life to get you to do his bidding.
-
Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.
-
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.
-
The great issue of life is to harness the drum major instinct.
-
The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.
-
Somebody must have sense enough to meet hate with love. Somebody must have sense enough to meet physical force with soul force. If we will but try this way, we will be able to change these conditions and yet at the same time win the hearts and souls of those who have kept these conditions alive a way as old as the insights of Jesus of Nazareth, as modern as the techniques of Mohandas K. Gandhi. There is another way.
-
The end of life is not to be happy, nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what may.
-
Every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God.
-
Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education.
-
Violence multiplies violence.