Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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If you want to move people, it has to be toward a vision that's positive for them, that taps important values, that gets them something they desire and it has to be presented in a compelling way so that they feel inspired to follow.
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We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say we will not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace.
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Find a voice in a whisper.
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I have a dream! To be free at last! Free at last! Free at last. And if a man has nothing to die for, Then his life is worth nothing.
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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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Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.
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It’s wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong! It’s wrong in America, it’s wrong in Germany, it’s wrong in Russia, it’s wrong in China! It was wrong in two thousand B.C., and it’s wrong in nineteen fifty-four A.D.! It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong!
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If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn't function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically.
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And see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky.
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Every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. Each can spell either salvation or doom.
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If a man hasn't found anything worth dying for, he hasn't anything worth living for.
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Nonviolence is a powerful as well as a just weapon. If you confront a man who has long been cruelly misusing you, and say, "Punish me, if you will; I do not deserve it, but I will accept it, so that the world will know I am right and you are wrong," then you wield a powerful and a just weapon. This man, your oppressor, is automatically morally defeated, and if he has any conscience, he is ashamed.
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There is some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us.
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[I] know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems.
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In our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man that he has no right to exist. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society.
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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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I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.
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Unarmed love is the most powerful force in all the world.
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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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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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God made the world from nothing, and if we can be nothing, then God can make something of us.
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But I say to you, my friends, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize.
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Faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future.
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When people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory.