Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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Darkness is only driven out with light, not more darkness.
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We can walk through the darkest night with the radiant conviction that all things work together for the good.
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We need not join the mad rush to purchase an earthly fallout shelter. God is our eternal fallout shelter. From Strength to Love.
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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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The softminded person always wants to freeze the moment and hold life in the gripping yoke of sameness.
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If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.
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There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that that have nothing to lose. People who have stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.
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Nonviolence is the most potent technique for oppressed people. Unearned suffering is redemptive.
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Education without direction is a one-sided social value. Direct action without education is a meaningless expression of pure energy.
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Love is the only creative, redemptive, transforming power, in the universe.
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Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? - "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free."
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Even when the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference.... In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.
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We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.
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In Christ there is no East nor West.
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I would rather be a man of conviction than a man of conformity.
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For all of us today, the battle is in our hands. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways to lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. We must keep going.
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Rioting is not revolutionary.
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The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.
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A world war - God forbid! - will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to untimely death. Yet there are those who sincerely feel that disarmament is an evil and international negotiation is an abominable waste of time.
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It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.
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Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
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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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A second thing that an individual must do in seeking to love his enemy is to discover the element of good in his enemy, and everytime you begin to hate that person and think of hating that person, realize that there is some good there and look at those good points which will over – balance the bad points.
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It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.