Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
-
I think a revolution can survive without single centralized leadership.
-
Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? - "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free."
-
Rioting is not revolutionary.
-
Love is the only creative, redemptive, transforming power, in the universe.
-
The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest.
-
In Christ there is no East nor West.
-
I want to suggest some of the things that should begin your life's blueprint. Number one...should be a deep belief in your own dignity. Your worth and your own somebodiness... Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
For you will never be what you ought to be until they [your fellow humans] are what they ought to be.
-
Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the instruments of love.
-
I firmly believe that the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent resistance is the only logical and moral approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States.
-
Education without direction is a one-sided social value. Direct action without education is a meaningless expression of pure energy.
-
It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.
-
I'm grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I plan to stand by nonviolence, because I have found it to be a philosophy of life that regulates not only my dealings in the struggle for racial justice, but also my dealings with people, and with my own self.
-
The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others.
-
It's not how long a man lives, but how well he uses the time allotted him.
-
The only time people do not like praise is when too much of it is going toward someone else.