Martin Luther King Jr Quotes
411 Martin Luther King Jr Quotes
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When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Martin Luther King Jr
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.
Martin Luther King Jr
Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
Martin Luther King Jr
Nineteen sixty-three is not an end but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
Martin Luther King Jr
But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must ever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
Martin Luther King Jr
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.
Martin Luther King Jr
We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, we cannot be satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Martin Luther King Jr
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.
Martin Luther King Jr
Go back to Mississippi; go back to Alabama; go back to South Carolina; go back to Georgia; go back to Louisiana; go back to the slums and ghettos of the northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can, and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.
Martin Luther King Jr
Creation is so designed that my personality can only be fulfilled in the context of community.
Martin Luther King Jr
Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the [person] who wields it.
Martin Luther King Jr
Our hope for creative living in this world house that we have inherited lies in our ability to re-establish the moral ends of our lives in personal character and social justice. Without this spiritual and moral reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own instruments.
Martin Luther King Jr
Among the moral imperatives of our time, we are challenged to work all over the world with unshakable determination to wipe out the last vestiges of racism.
Martin Luther King Jr
One cannot hope to keep people locked out of the earthly kingdom of wealth, health and happiness. Either they share in the blessings of the world or they organize to break down and overthrow those structures or governments which stand in the way
of their goals.
Martin Luther King Jr
Racism can well be that corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on Western civilization…. If Western civilization does not now respond constructively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all [people].
Martin Luther King Jr
The first step in the world-wide war against poverty is passionate commitment.
Martin Luther King Jr
It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.
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 Western civilization continues to degenerate until it, like twenty-four of its predecessors, falls hopelessly into a bottomless void, the cause will be not only its undeniable sinfulness, but also its appalling blindness.
Martin Luther King Jr
If American democracy gradually disintegrates, it will be due as much to a lack of insight as to a lack of commitment to right.
Martin Luther King Jr
Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force.
Martin Luther King Jr
Fortunately, history does not pose problems without eventually producing solutions. The disenchanted, the disadvantaged and the disinherited seem, at times of deep crisis, to summon up some sort of genius that enables them to perceive and capture the appropriate weapons to carve out their destiny. Such was the peaceable weapons of nonviolent direct action. . .
Martin Luther King Jr
If Americans permit thought-control, business-control, and freedom-control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism.
Martin Luther King Jr
Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for civil rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.
Martin Luther King Jr
[Nonviolence] first does something to the souls of those committed to it. It gives them a 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.
Martin Luther King Jr
We must use time creatively in the knowledge that the time is always right to do right.
Martin Luther King Jr
These are revolutionary times; all over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. . . We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of Communism, and
our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-antirevolutionaries.
Martin Luther King Jr
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King Jr
The dispossessed of this nation--the poor, . . . live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the
load of poverty.
Martin Luther King Jr
Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate.
Martin Luther King Jr
It’s one of the strangest things that all the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace. . . And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. . .What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one
day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is pre-existent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.
Martin Luther King Jr
When a subject people moves toward freedom, they are not creating a cleavage, but are revealing the cleavage which apologists of the old order have sought to conceal.
Martin Luther King Jr
It is no longer merely the idealist or the doom-ridden who seeks for some controlling force capable of challenging the instrumentalities of destruction. Many are searching. Sooner or later all the peoples of the world, without regard to the political systems under which they live, will have to discover a way to live together in peace.
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 [people] to rise above 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. The movement for peace and justice can only be a success if it has both a mass and a militant character.
Martin Luther King Jr
Cowardice asks the questions, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, Is it politic? And Vanity comes along and asks the question, Is it popular? But Conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.
Martin Luther King Jr
We can all get more together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power. Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to affect change, and we need power.
Martin Luther King Jr
The present spontaneous, largely disorganized and spasmodic methods of piecemeal approaches, differing from city to city, and with a variety of tempos, will have to give way to broad national planning. A nation which could put more than eleven million men in arms in a few short years, which poured torrents of sophisticated munitions from hundreds of thousands of coordinated facilities and deployed them in war, has the capacity to master a problem of much less complexity. It needs only the same will it possessed when it felt its existence threatened.
Martin Luther King Jr
It seems glaringly obvious to me that the development of a humanitarian means of dealing with some of the social problems of the world--and the correlative revolution in American values that this will entail--is a much better way of protecting ourselves against the threat of violence than the military means we have chosen.
Martin Luther King Jr
More and more, the civil rights movement will become engaged in the task of organizing people into permanent groups to protect their own interests and to produce change on their behalf. This is a tedious task which may take years, but the results are more permanent and meaningful.
Martin Luther King Jr
If you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live. You may be thirty-eight years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house. So you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at thirty eight as you would be at ninety. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right. You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to stand up for justice. . .
Martin Luther King Jr
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