Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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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.
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Darkness is only driven out with light, not more darkness.
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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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Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.
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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.
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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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We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. Love is the key to the solution of the problems of the world.
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Every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. Each can spell either salvation or doom.
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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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Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts.
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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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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 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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I'm grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle.
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At the heart of all that civilization has meant and developed is 'community' - the mutually cooperative and voluntary venture of man to assume a semblance of responsibility for his brother.
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I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.
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God made the world from nothing, and if we can be nothing, then God can make something of us.
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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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I know that God is not going to willfully hurt us. Why there is suffering is the business of the Lord, but He never seems to give us more than we can bear.
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Never, never be afraid to do what's right.
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One of the most persistent ambiguities that we face is that everybody talks about peace as a goal. However, it does not take sharpest-eyed sophistication to discern that while everbody talks about peace, peace has become practically nobody's business among the power-wielders. Many men cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace.
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We all can't be famous but we can all be great and we become great when we serve others.
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A man does not measure its height in moments of comfort, but in terms of change and controversy.