Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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Rioting is not revolutionary.
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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.
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Money, like any other force such as electricity, is amoral and can be used for either good or evil.
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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.
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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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Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts.
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The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others.
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For you will never be what you ought to be until they [your fellow humans] are what they ought to be.
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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.
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Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's often vocal sanction of things as they are.
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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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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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In Christ there is no East nor West.
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It is not only poverty that torments the Negro; it is the fact of poverty amid plenty. It is a misery generated by the gulf between the affluence he sees in the mass media and the deprivation he experiences in his everyday life.
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Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.
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I'm grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle.
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I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems. And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn't popular to talk about it in some circles today. I'm not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I'm talking about a strong, demanding love.
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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.
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In spite of the fact that the law of revenge solves no social problems, men continue to follow its disastrous leading. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path.
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I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission - a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man".
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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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The only time people do not like praise is when too much of it is going toward someone else.
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Unarmed love is the most powerful force in all the world.
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It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the ligitimate goals of his life.