Martin Luther King Jr Quotes
411 Martin Luther King Jr Quotes
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Just as lightning makes no sound until it strikes, the Negro Revolution generated quietly. But when it struck, the revealing flash of its power and the impact of its sincerity and fervor displayed a force of a frightening intensity.
Martin Luther King Jr
Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper. The storm clouds did not release a ‘gentle rain from heaven,’ but a whirlwind, which has not yet spent its force or attained its full momentum.
Martin Luther King Jr
I learned the reason for the long delay that preceded surgery. He told me that the razor tip of the instrument had been touching my aorta and that my whole chest had to be opened to extract it.
Martin Luther King Jr
What was it that gave us the second chance? To answer this we must answer another question. Why did this Revolution occur in 1963?
Martin Luther King Jr
In the wording the Supreme Court decision had revealed an awareness that attempts would be made to evade its intent. The phrase ‘all deliberate speed’ did not mean that another century should be allowed to unfold before we released Negro children from the narrow pigeonhole of the segregated schools; it mean that, giving some courtesy and consideration to the need for softening old attitudes and outdated customs, democracy must press ahead, out of the past of ignorance and intolerance, and into the present of educational opportunity and moral freedom.
Martin Luther King Jr
The progress that was supposed to have been achieved with deliberate speed had created change for less than 2 percent of Negro children in most areas of the South and not even one-tenth of 1 percent in some parts of the deepest South.
Martin Luther King Jr
One must understand the pendulum swing between the elation that arose when the edict was handed down and the despair that followed the failure to bring it to life.
Martin Luther King Jr
The Negro felt that he recognized the same old bone that had been tossed to him in the past – only now it was being handed to him on a platter, with courtesy.
Martin Luther King Jr
Negroes had seen their government go to the brink of nuclear conflict more than once. The justification for risking the annihilation of the human race was always expressed in terms of America’s willingness to go to any lengths to preserve freedom.
Martin Luther King Jr
While the Negro is not so selfish as to stand isolated in concern for his own dilemma, ignoring the ebb and flow of events around the world, there is a certain bitter irony in the picture of his country championing freedom in foreign lands and failing to ensure that freedom to twenty million of its own.
Martin Luther King Jr
The silent password was fear.
Martin Luther King Jr
There was also the dread of change, that all too prevalent fear which hounds those whose attitudes have been hardened by the long winter of reaction. Many were apprehensive of social ostracism.
Martin Luther King Jr
The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King Jr
You would be living, in fact, in the most segregated city in America.
Martin Luther King Jr
Had we moved in while Connor and Boutwell were electioneering, Connor would undoubtedly have capitalized on our presence by using it as an emotion-charged issue for his own political advantage, waging a vigorous campaign to persuade the white community that he, and he alone, could defend the city’s official policies of segregation. We might have had the effect of helping Connor win. Reluctantly, we decided to postpone the demonstrations until the day after the run-off.
Martin Luther King Jr
The bell of man’s inhumanity to man does not toll for any one man. It tolls for you, for me, for all of us.
Martin Luther King Jr
The Alabama courts are notorious for ‘sitting on’ cases of this nature. This has been a maliciously effective, pseudo-legal way of breaking the back of legitimate moral protest.
Martin Luther King Jr
It was a serious blow. We had used up all the money we had on hand for cash bonds. There were our people in jail, for whom we had a moral responsibility. Fifty more were to go in with Ralph and me. This would be the largest single group to be arrested to date. Without bail facilities, how could we guarantee their eventual release?
Martin Luther King Jr
‘Martin he said, ‘this means you can’t go to jail. We need money. We need a lot of money. We need it now. You are the only one who has the contacts to get it. If you go to jail, we are lost. The battle of Birmingham is lost.’
Martin Luther King Jr
I sat there, conscious of twenty-four pairs of eyes. I thought about the people in jail. I thought about the Birmingham Negroes already lining the streets of the city, waiting to see me put into practice what I had so passionately preached. How could my failure now to submit to arrest be explained to the local community?
Martin Luther King Jr
On the Monday following our jailing, she [Coretta Scott King] decided she must do something. Remembering the call that John [F.] Kennedy had made to her when I was jailed in Georgia during the 1960 election campaign, she placed a call to the president. Within a few minutes, his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, phoned back. She told him that she had learned I was in solitary confinement and was afraid for my safety. The attorney general promised to do everything he could to have my situation eased. A few hours later President Kennedy himself called Coretta from Palm Beach, and assured her that he would look into the matter immediately. … After the president’s intervention, conditions changed considerably.
Martin Luther King Jr
‘Harry Belafonte has been able to raise fifty thousand dollars for bail bonds. It is available immediately. And he says whatever else you need, he will raise it.’ I found it hard to say what I felt. Jones’s message had brought me more than relief from the immediate concern about money; more than gratitude for the loyalty of friends far away; more than confirmation that the life of the movement could not be snuffed out.
Martin Luther King Jr
What silenced me was a profound sense of awe. I was aware of a feeling that had been present all along below the surface of consciousness, pressed down under the weight of concern for the movement.
Martin Luther King Jr
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Martin Luther King Jr
Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
Martin Luther King Jr
We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: ‘Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?’ ‘Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?’
Martin Luther King Jr
The system to which they have been committed lies on it’s deathbed. The only imponderable is the question of how costly they will make the funeral.
Martin Luther King Jr
I like to believe that Birmingham will one day become a model in southern race relations. I like to believe that the negative extremes of Birmingham’s past will resolve into the positive and Utopian extreme of her future; that the sins of a dark yesterday will be redeemed in the achievements of a bright tomorrow. I have this hope because, once on a summer day, a dream came true. The city of Birmingham discovered a conscience.
Martin Luther King Jr
[Lyndon Johnson] He has set the twin goal of a battle against discrimination within the war against poverty.
Martin Luther King Jr
Ask a prisoner released after years of confinement in jail what efforts he faces in taking on the privileges and responsibilities of freedom, and the enormity of the Negroes’ task in the years ahead becomes clear.
Martin Luther King Jr
Just as a doctor will occasionally reopen a wound, because a dangerous infection hovers beneath the half-healed surface, the revolution for human rights is opening up unhealthy areas in American life and permitting a new and wholesome healing to take place.
Martin Luther King Jr
The concept of nonviolence has spread on a mass scale in the United States as an instrument of change in the field of race relations. To date, only a relatively few practitioners of nonviolent direct action have been committed to its philosophy. The great mass have used it pragmatically as a tactical weapon, without being ready to live it.
Martin Luther King Jr
Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrims’ pride; from every mountainside, let freedom ring!
Martin Luther King Jr
Let freedom ring!
Martin Luther King Jr
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal.
Martin Luther King Jr
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
Martin Luther King Jr
I have a dream that one day the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
Martin Luther King Jr
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!
Martin Luther King Jr
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.
Martin Luther King Jr
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.
Martin Luther King Jr
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