Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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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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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 Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest.
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[I] know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems.
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There is little hope for us until we become tough-minded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and down-right ignorance.
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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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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.
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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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The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others.
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If you haven't found something worth dying for, you're not fit to live.
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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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By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up.
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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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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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I feel that non-violence is really the only way that we can follow because violence is just so self-defeating. A riot ends up creating many more problems for the negro community than it solved. We can through violence burn down a building, but you can't establish justice. You can murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder through violence. You can murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. And what we're trying to get rid of is hate, injustice, and all of these other things that continue the long night of man's inhumanity to man.
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The truth may hurt, but love helps ease the pain.
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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.
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Find a voice in a whisper.
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Unarmed love is the most powerful force in all the world.
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We must move forward in the days ahead with audacious faith. The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.
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Our problem is not to be rid of fear but rather to harness and master it.
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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.
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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.
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God made the world from nothing, and if we can be nothing, then God can make something of us.