Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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Our lives are not fully lived if we're not willing to die for those we love, for what we believe.
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I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled.
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Power is the ability to achieve purpose.
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We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.
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There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.
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...we must realize that a vast majority of believers are still searching and will continue to search for the being who is the "source of human good." Those who seek with clear heads and sincere hearts will in some measure find. Of course the true seeker will realize that there is no one way to find God. To be sure, there are many possible ways of finding God.
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In any civilized society, it is every citizen's responsibility to obey just laws. But at the same time, it is every citizen's responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
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The words 'I will forgive you, but I'll never forget what you've done' never explain the real nature of forgiveness.
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If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, "There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.
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If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.
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I was not afraid of the words of the violent, but of the silence of the honest.
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We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.
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A time comes when silence is betrayal.
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Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
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I am not afraid of the word tension.
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Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
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Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.
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Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
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Everyone has an opportunity to be great because everyone has an opportunity to serve.
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We must stand up and say, "I'm black and I'm beautiful," and this self-affirmation is the black man's need, made compelling by the white man's crimes against him.
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The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.
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It's very easy for one talking about violence and hatred for the white man to appeal to [Negro from ghetto]. I have never thought of this, but I think this is quite true, that if, even if you talk to them about nonviolence from a tactical point of view, they can't quite see it because they don't even know they're outnumbered.
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Our generation will not have regretted both perverse crimes, and the eerie silence of the kind.
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When I took up the cross I recognized it's meaning. The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately, that you die on.