Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
-
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
-
Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.
-
We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.
-
Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation.
-
To be Negro in America is to hope against hope.
-
I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.
-
The difference between a dreamer and a visionary is that a dreamer has his eyes closed and a visionary has his eyes open.
-
I also came to see that liberalism's superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man's defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.
-
Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.
-
I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
-
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.
-
If you've got nothing worth dying for, you've got nothing worth living for.
-
You cannot defect form an insight. You cannot unsee what you have seen.
-
But by all means, keep moving.
-
Set yourself earnestly to discover what you are made to do, and then give yourself passionately to the doing of it.
-
You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.
-
Violence is anything that denies human integrity, and leads to hopelessness and helplessness.
-
Like anybody, I would like to have a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will.
-
I have condemned any organizer of war, regardless of his rank or nationality.
-
Unearned suffering is redemptive.
-
Lightning makes no sound until it strikes.
-
I feel that segregation is totally unchristian, and that it is against everything the Christian religion stands for.
-
Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
-
Hate destroys the hater.