Martin Luther King Jr Quotes
411 Martin Luther King Jr Quotes
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
When Rome wished to Romanize a province, she established a small colony of people who lived by Roman law and Roman customs and who, though in another country, held fast to their Roman allegiance. This powerful, creative minority spread the… Roman culture.
Martin Luther King Jr
We must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or earth-bound idea, for at the heart of our universe is a higher reality… to which we must be conformed.
Martin Luther King Jr
Someone has said, ‘I love reforms but I hate reformers.’ A reformer may be an untransformed nonconformist whose rebellion against the evils of society has left him annoyingly rigid and unreasonably impatient.
Martin Luther King Jr
The transformed nonconformist…, never yields to the passive sort of patience that is an excuse to do nothing. And this very transformation saves him from speaking irresponsible words that estrange without reconciling and from making hasty judgments that are blind to the necessity of social progress. He recognizes that social change will not come overnight, yet he works as though it is an imminent possibility.
Martin Luther King Jr
[In 1963] Our planet teeters on the brink of atomic annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; truth lies prostrate on the rugged hills of nameless calvaries; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.
Martin Luther King Jr
Everybody passionately seeks to be well-adjusted. We must of course, be well-adjusted if we are to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities, but there are some things in our world to which men of goodwill must be maladjusted. I confess that I never intend to become adjusted…
Martin Luther King Jr
Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.
Martin Luther King Jr
Modern man is presently having a rendezvous with chaos, not merely because of human badness but also because of human stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr
If modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war and eventually transforms his early habitat into an inferno such as even the mind of Dante could not imagine, it will have resulted from downright badness and also from downright stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr
One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right if the head is totally wrong. Only though the bringing together of head and heart – intelligence and goodness – shall man rise to a fulfillment of his true nature.
Martin Luther King Jr
I know many people of limited formal training who have amazing intelligence and foresight.
Martin Luther King Jr
The call for intelligence is a call for open mindedness, sound judgment, and love for truth. It is a call for men to rise about the stagnation of closed mindedness and the paralysis of gullibility. One does not need to be a profound scholar to be open minded, nor a keen academician to engage in an assiduous pursuit for truth.
Martin Luther King Jr
At times in our lives the tail winds of joy, triumph, and fulfillment favor us, and at the times the head winds of disappointment, sorrow, and tragedy beat unrelentingly against us. Shall we permit adverse winds to overwhelm us as we journey across life’s mighty Atlantic, or will our inner spiritual engines sustain us in spite of the winds?
Martin Luther King Jr
The man who… knows that no burden can overwhelm him and no wind of adversity can blow his hope way. He can stand anything that can happen to him.
Martin Luther King Jr
Peace as the world commonly understands it comes when the summer sky is clear and the sun shines in scintillating beauty, when the pocketbook is full, when the mind and body are free of ache and pain, and when the shores of Spain have been reached.
Martin Luther King Jr
True peace, a calm that exceeds all description and all explanation, is peace amid storm and tranquility amid disaster.
Martin Luther King Jr
We must unflinchingly face our fears and honestly ask ourselves why we are afraid. This confrontation will, to some measure, grant us power. We shall never be cured of fear by escapism or repression, for the more we attempt to ignore and repress our fears, the more we multiply our inner-conflicts.
Martin Luther King Jr
By looking squarely and honestly at our fears we learn that many of them are residues of some childhood need or apprehension.
Martin Luther King Jr
By bringing our fears to the forefront of consciousness, we may find them to be more imaginary than real.
Martin Luther King Jr
More often than not, fear involves the misuse of the imagination.
Martin Luther King Jr
We can master fear through one of the supreme virtues known to man: courage.
Martin Luther King Jr
Courage… is the power of the mind to overcome fear.
Martin Luther King Jr
Courage takes the fear produced by a definite object into itself and thereby conquers the fear involved.
Martin Luther King Jr
Courage, the determination not to be overwhelmed by any object, however frightful, enables us to stand up to any fear.
Martin Luther King Jr
Forces that threaten to negate life must be challenged by courage, which is the power of life to affirm itself in spite of life’s ambiguities.
Martin Luther King Jr
Death is inevitable. It is a democracy for all of the people, not an aristocracy for some of the people – kings die and beggars die; young men die and old men die; learned men die and ignorant men die. We need not fear it.
Martin Luther King Jr
At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. The nonviolent resister would contend that in the struggle for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. To retaliate in kind would do nothing but intensify the existence of hate in the universe. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.
Martin Luther King Jr
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, individualists 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.
Martin Luther King Jr
Despite it’s short comings we loved it [The South] as home and had a real desire to do something about the problems that we had felt so keenly as youngsters. We never wanted to be considered detached spectators.
Martin Luther King Jr
[Coretta] She saw the Negroes crowded into the backs of segregated buses and knew that she would be riding there too.
Martin Luther King Jr
Although we had come back to the South with the hope of playing a part in the changes, we knew were on the horizon, we had no notion yet of how the changes would come. About, and no inkling that in little more than a year we would be involved in a movement that was to alter Montgomery forever and to have repercussions throughout the world.
Martin Luther King Jr
I was anxious to change the impression in the community that Dexter was a sort of silk-stocking church catering only to a certain class.
Martin Luther King Jr
I rose every morning at five-thirty and spent three hours writing the thesis, returning to it late at night for another three hours.
Martin Luther King Jr
By 1940 there were not more than 2,000 Negro voters in all Alabama. Today [around 1958] the number is closer to 50,000, but although this represents less than 10 percent of all Negroes of voting age in the state.
Martin Luther King Jr
Anyone who starts out with the conviction that the road to racial justice is only one lane wide will inevitably create a traffic jam and make the journey infinitely longer.
Martin Luther King Jr
Not only was the community faced with competing leadership; it was also crippled by the indifference of the educated group. This indifference expressed itself in a lack of participation in any move toward better racial conditions, and a sort of tacit acceptance of things as they were.
Martin Luther King Jr
Frequently Negroes paid their fares at the front door, and then were forced to get off and re-board the bus at the rear. Often the bus pulled off with the Negroes dime in the box before he had had time to reach the rear door.
Martin Luther King Jr
No one can understand the action of Mrs [Rosa] Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, ‘I can take it no longer.’ Mrs [Rosa] Parks refusal to move back was her intrepid affirmation that she had had enough. It was an individual expression of a timeless longing for human dignity and freedom.
Martin Luther King Jr
History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.
Martin Luther King Jr
We are only doing in a minor way what Gandhi did in India; and certainly no one referred to him as an unrepentant sinner; he is considered by many a saint.
Martin Luther King Jr
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Return from Martin Luther King Jr Quotes to Quoteswise.com