Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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There are always those who say legislation can't solve the problem. There is a half-truth involved here. It is true that legislation cannot solve the whole problem. It can solve some of the problem. It may be true that morality can't be legislated, but behavior can be regulated.
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But alas! Science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide.
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The softminded person always wants to freeze the moment and hold life in the gripping yoke of sameness.
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I often feel like saying, when I hear the question 'People aren't ready,' that it's like telling a person who is trying to swim, 'Don't jump in that water until you learn how to swim.' When actually you will never learn how to swim until you get in the water. And I think people have to have an opportunity to develop themselves and govern themselves.
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Even if I were certain that the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree this very day.
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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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Whom you would change, you must first love.
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When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, it loses its social perspective.... There is something about a war like this that makes people insensitive. It dulls the conscience. It strengthens the forces of reaction, and it brings into being bitterness and hatred and violence.
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A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters. To lightly dismiss a success because it does not usher in a complete order of justice is to fail to comprehend the process of achieving full victory.
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Without justice, there can be no peace.
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Courage faces fear and thereby masters it. Cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it.
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The only time people do not like praise is when too much of it is going toward someone else.
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Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual.
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History has thrust something upon me from which I cannot turn away.
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In a real sense faith is total surrender to God.
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Through our scientific and technological genius we've made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers-or we will all perish together as fools.
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But we are gravely mistaken to think that Christianity protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence. Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian, one must take up his cross, with all of its difficulties and agonizing and tragedy-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its marks upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way which comes only through suffering.
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Racial understanding is not something we find, but something that we must create. Through education, we seek to change attitudes.
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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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I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.
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As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy even if I just got a good checkup at Mayo Clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent. We are interdependent.
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Darkness is only driven out with light, not more darkness.
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Any nation or government that deprives an individual of freedom is in that moment committing an act of moral and spiritual murder. Any individual who is not concerned about his freedom commits an act of moral and spiritual suicide.
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Rioting is not revolutionary.