Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.
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My friends, all I'm trying to say is that if we are to go forward today, we've got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we've left behind. That's the only way that we would be able to make of our world a better world, and to make of this world what God wants it to be and the real purpose and meaning of it.
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We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there "is" such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and postive action.
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The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.
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Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you're nobody.
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Unconditional love will have the final word in reality.
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Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.
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Freedom is one thing. You have it all or you are not free.
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I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.
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Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. [...] You only need a heart full of grace.
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We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the very opposite of the democratic creed.... This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.
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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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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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Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.
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One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.
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Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. ... We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode.
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War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.
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One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.
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In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man.
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When we rise in the morning... at the table we drink coffee which is provided to us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African; before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half the world.
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I’ve been to the Mountaintop.
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One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
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The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.
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The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.