Martin Luther King Jr Quotes
411 Martin Luther King Jr Quotes
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Coretta [Scott King] was neither bitter nor panicky. She had accepted the whole thing with unbelievable composure. As I noticed her calmness I became even more calm myself.
Martin Luther King Jr
The previous August of 1953, after being in school twenty-one years without a break, I had reached the satisfying moment of completing the residential requirements for the PhD degree. The major job that remained was to write my doctoral thesis. In the meantime I had felt that it would be wise to start considering a job so that I could be placed at least by September 1954.
Martin Luther King Jr
Three colleges had offered me attractive and challenging posts – one a teaching post, one a deanship, and the other an administrative position. In the midst of thinking about each of these positions, I had received a letter from the officers of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church of Montgomery saying that they were without a Pastor and that they would be glad to have me preach when I was again in that section of the country.
Martin Luther King Jr
The Church was comparatively small, with a membership of around three hundred people, but it occupied a central place in the community. Many influential and respected citizens – professional people with substantial incomes – were among its members.
Martin Luther King Jr
I was very conscious this time that I was on trial. How could I best impress the congregation? Since the membership was educated and intelligent, should I attempt to interest it with a display of scholarship? Or should I preach just as I had always done?
Martin Luther King Jr
Remember you are a channel of the gospel and not the source.
Martin Luther King Jr
It was one of those turbulent days in which the clouds hovered low, but as the plane lifted itself above the weather, the choppiness of the flight soon passed.
Martin Luther King Jr
As I watched the silvery sheets of clouds below and the deep dark shadow of the blue above, I faced up to the problem of what to do about the several offers that had come my way. At this time I was torn in two directions. On the one hand I was inclined toward the pastorate; on the other hand, toward educational work. Which way should I go? And if I accepted a church, should it be one in the South, with all the tragic implications of segregation, or one of the two available pulpits in the North?
Martin Luther King Jr
As far back as I could remember. I had resented segregation, and had asked my parents urgent and pointed questions about it. While I was still too young for school I had already learned something about discrimination.
Martin Luther King Jr
Every parent at some time faces the problem of explaining the facts of life to his child. Just as inevitably, for the Negro parent, the moment comes when he must explain to his offspring the facts of segregation.
Martin Luther King Jr
My mother took me on her lap and began telling me about slavery and how it had ended with the Civil War. She tried to explain the divided system of the South – the segregated schools, restaurants, theaters, housing; the white and colored signs on drinking fountains, waiting rooms, lavatories – as a social condition rather than a natural order. Then she said the words that almost every Negro hears before he can yet understand the injustice that makes them necessary: ‘You are as good as anyone.’
Martin Luther King Jr
My mother, as the daughter of a successful minister, had grown up in comparative comfort. She had been sent to the best available school and college and had, in general, been protected from the worst blights of discrimination. But my father, a sharecropper’s son, had met its brutalities at first hand, and had begun to strike back at an early age. With his fearless honesty and his robust, dynamic presence, his words commanded attention.
Martin Luther King Jr
From before I was born, my father had refused to ride the city buses…
Martin Luther King Jr
With his heritage, it is not surprising that I had also learned to abhor segregation, considering it both rationally inexplicable and morally unjustifiable.
Martin Luther King Jr
As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time that I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.
Martin Luther King Jr
Having the usual growing boy’s pleasure in movies, I had yet gone to a downtown theater in Atlanta only once. The experience of having to enter a rear door and sit in a filthy peanut gallery was so obnoxious that I could not enjoy the picture. I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate restrooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.
Martin Luther King Jr
Now, I thought, as the plane carried me toward Detroit, I have a chance to escape from the long night of segregation. Can I return to a society that condones a system I have abhorred since childhood? These questions were still unanswered when I returned to Boston.
Martin Luther King Jr
Finally we [Coretta and I] agreed that in spite of the disadvantages and the inevitable sacrifices our greatest service could be rendered in our native South.
Martin Luther King Jr
We have been talking a great deal this morning about customs. It has been affirmed that any change in present conditions would mean going against the ‘cherished customs’ of our community. But if the customs are wrong we have every reason in the world to change them. The decision which we must make now is whether we will give our allegiance to outmoded and unjust customs or to the ethical demands of the universe.
Martin Luther King Jr
My friends and associates are being arrested. It would be the height of cowardice for me to stay away. I would rather be in jail ten years than desert my people now. I have begun the struggle, and I can’t turn back. I have reached the point of no return.
Martin Luther King Jr
Where do we go from here? Since the problem in Montgomery is merely symptomatic of the larger national problem, where do we go not only in Montgomery but all over the South and the nation? Forces maturing for years have given rise to the present crisis in race relations. What are these forces that have brought the crisis about? What will be the conclusion? Are we caught in a social and political impasse, or do we have at our disposal the creative resources to achieve the ideals of brotherhood and harmonious living?
Martin Luther King Jr
One day the parent rises his hand to strike his son, only to discover that the son is now as tall as he is. The parent is suddenly afraid – fearful that the son will use his new physical power to repay his parent for all the blows of the past.
Martin Luther King Jr
Non violence can touch men where the law cannot reach them.
Martin Luther King Jr
The nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. Finally it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality. I suggest this approach because I think it is the only way to reestablish the broken community.
Martin Luther King Jr
Desegregation will break down the legal barriers, and bring men together physically. But something must happen so to touch the hearts and souls of men that they will come together, not because the law says it, but because it is natural and right. In other words, our ultimate goal is integration which is genuine intergroup and interpersonal living. Only through nonviolence can this goal be attained, for the aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of the beloved community.
Martin Luther King Jr
Non violence is a way of humility and self-restraint.
Martin Luther King Jr
We must seek democracy and not the substitution of one tyranny for another.
Martin Luther King Jr
The nonviolent approach provides an answer to the long debated question of gradualism versus immediacy. On the one hand it prevents one from falling into the sort of patience which is an excuse for do-nothingism and escapism, ending up in standstillism. On the other hand it saves one from the irresponsible words which estrange without reconciling and the hasty judgment which is blind to the necessities of social process. It recognizes the need for moving toward the goal of justice with wise restraint and calm reasonableness. But it also recognizes the immorality of slowing up in the move toward justice and capitulating to the guardians of an unjust status quo. It recognizes that social change cannot come overnight. But it causes one to work as if it were a possibility the next morning.
Martin Luther King Jr
Nonviolence is essentially a positive concept. Its corollary must always be growth. On the one hand nonviolence requires noncooperation with evil; on the other hand it requires cooperation with the constructive forces of good. Without this constructive aspect noncooperation ends where it begins. Therefore, the Negro must get to work on a program with a broad range of positive goals.
Martin Luther King Jr
The fight is far from over, because it is neither won, as some assert, not lost, as the calamity-ridden declare.
Martin Luther King Jr
We cannot wait. We can’t wait.
Martin Luther King Jr
I see a young Negro boy. He is sitting on a stoop in front of a vermin-infested apartment house in Harlem. The stench of garbage is in the halls. The drunks, the jobless, the junkies are shadow figures of his everyday world. The boy goes to a school attended mostly by Negro students with a scattering of Puerto Ricans. His father is one of the jobless. His mother is a sleep-in domestic, working for a family on Long Island.
Martin Luther King Jr
I see a young Negro girl. She is sitting on the stoop of a rickety wooden one-family house in Birmingham. Some visitors would call it a shack. It needs paint badly and the patched-up roof appears in danger of caving in. Half a dozen small children, in various stages of undress are scampering about the house. The girl is forced to play the role of their mother. She can no longer attend the all-Negro school in her neighborhood because her mother died only recently after a car accident. Neighbors say if the ambulance hadn’t come so late to take her to the all-Negro hospital the mother might still be alive. The girl’s father is a porter in a downtown department store. He will always be a porter, for there are no promotions for the Negro in this store, where every counter serves him except the one that sells hot dogs and orange juice.
Martin Luther King Jr
The boy and this girl, separated by stretching miles, are wondering: Why does misery constantly haunt the Negro? In some distant past, had their forebears done some tragic injury to the nation, and was the curse of punishment upon the black race? Had they shirked in their duty as patriots, betrayed their country, denied their national birthright? Had they refused to defend their land against a foreign foe?
Martin Luther King Jr
Not all of history is recorded in the books supplied to school children in Harlem or Birmingham.
Martin Luther King Jr
Wherever there was hard work, dirty work, dangerous work – in the mines, on the docks, in the blistering foundries – Negroes had done more than their share.
Martin Luther King Jr
The pale history books in Harlem and Birmingham told how the nation had fought a ware over slavery. Abraham Lincoln had signed a document that would come to be known as the Emancipation Proclamation. The war had been won but not a just peace. Equality had never arrived. Equality was a hundred years late.
Martin Luther King Jr
The bitterly cold winter of 1962 lingered throughout the opening months of 1963, touching the land with chill and frost, and then was replaced by a placid spring. Americans awaited a quiet summer. That it would be pleasant they had no doubt. The worst of it would be the nightmare created by sixty million cars, all apparently trying to reach the same destination at the same time. Fifty million families looked forward to the pleasure of two hundred million vacations in the American tradition of the frenetic hunt for relaxation.
Martin Luther King Jr
Never in American history had a group seized the streets, the squares, the sacrosanct business thoroughfares and the marbled halls of government to protest and proclaim the unendurability of their oppression. Had room-sized machines turned human, burst from the plants that housed them and stalked the land in revolt, the nation could not have been more amazed.
Martin Luther King Jr
The nation had come to count on him as a creature who could quietly endure, silently suffer and patiently wait. He was well trained in service and, whatever the provocation, he neither pushed back nor spoke back.
Martin Luther King Jr
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