Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
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Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.
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History is a great teacher. Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.
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In a world facing the revolt of ragged and hungry masses of God's children; in a world torn between the tensions of East and West, white and colored, individuals and collectivists; in a world whose cultural and spiritual power lags so far behind her technological capabilities that we live each day on the verge of nuclear co-annihilation; in this world, nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis, it is an imperative for action.
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Look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin.
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Agape is disinterested love. . . . Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. . . . Therefore, agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both.
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What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough-mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hard-heartedness?
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You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.
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As television beamed the image of this extraordinary gathering across the border oceans, everyone who believed in man's capacity to better himself had a moment of inspiration and confidence in the future of the human race.
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We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.
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Procrastination is still the thief of time.
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The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven.
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I've always tried to be what I call militantly nonviolent. I don't believe that anyone could seriously accuse me of not being totally committed to the breakdown of segregation.
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Our age is one of guided missiles and unguided men.
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Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.
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[W]e are the heirs of a past of rope, fire, and murder. I for one am not ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us.
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It is a cruel injustice to tell a bootless man to pull himself up by his bootstraps.
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I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
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An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizons of his particular individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. And this is one of the big problems of life, that so many people never quite get to the point of rising above self. And so they end up the tragic victims of self-centeredness. They end up the victims of distorted and disrupted personality.
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America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'
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The movement for equality and justice can only be a success if it has both a mass and militant character; the barriers to be overcome require both.
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When the Negro finds the courage to be free, he faces dogs and guns and clubs and fire hoses totally unafraid, and the white men with those dogs, guns, clubs and fire hoses see that the Negro they have traditionally called "boy" has become a man.
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We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.
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The whole world must see that Israel must exist and has the right to exist, and is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world.
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I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too small in quantity, but they are big in quality.