Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
-
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.
-
The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others.
-
Life isn't worth living until you have found something worth dying for.
-
I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself.
-
In the event of a violent revolution, we would be sorely outnumbered. And when it was all over, the Negro would face the same unchanged conditions, the same squalor and deprivation-the only difference being that his bitterness would be even more intense, his disenchantment even more abject. Thus, in purely practical as well as moral terms, the American Negro has no rational alternative to nonviolence.
-
Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.
-
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.
-
Courage faces fear and thereby masters it. Cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it.
-
Our problem is not to be rid of fear but rather to harness and master it.
-
The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest.
-
The truth may hurt, but love helps ease the pain.
-
Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.
-
The non-violent resistor not only avoids external, physical violence, but he avoids internal violence of spirit. He not only refuses to shoot his opponent, but he refuses to hate him. And he stands with understanding, goodwill at all times.
-
This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together– black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu– a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.
-
Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement, not replace, the progress of change. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force.
-
[I] know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems.
-
Education without direction is a one-sided social value. Direct action without education is a meaningless expression of pure energy.
-
We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.
-
I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest.
-
Every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. Each can spell either salvation or doom.
-
I must face the fact, as all others in positions of leadership must do, that America today is an extremely sick nation, and that something could well happen to me at any time. I feel, though, that my cause is so right, so moral, that if I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause.
-
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies... True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look on uneasily upon the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation.
-
The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific and religious freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!
-
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.