Top 100 Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes
#1. The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#2. Only God is able. It is faith in Him that we must rediscover. With this faith we can transform bleak and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of joy and bring new light into the dark caverns of pessimism.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#3. The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism
Martin Luther King Jr.
#4. You will change your mind; You will change your looks; You will change your smile,laugh, and ways but no matter what you change, you will always be you
Martin Luther King Jr.
#6. 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.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#7. The Negro has no room to make any substantial compromises because his store of advantages is too small. He must press unrelentingly for quality, integrated education or his whole drive for freedom will be undermined by the absence of a most vital and indispensable element - learning.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#8. We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#11. I feel that the time is always right to do what is right. Where progress for the Negro in America is concerned, there is a tragic misconception of time among whites. They seem to cherish a strange, irrational notion that something in the very flow of time will cure all ills.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#12. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#13. One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#14. If you can't fly run, if u cant run
then walk, if you can't walk then crawl
but whatever you do keep moving forward.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#15. We are challenged to develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#16. Democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#17. Money, like any other force such as electricity, is amoral and can be used for either good or evil.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#21. We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny ... I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#22. The greatness of man cannot be seen in the hours of comfort and convenience, but rather in moments of conflict/adversity
Martin Luther King Jr.
#25. I" cannot reach fulfillment without "thou." The self cannot be self without other selves. Self-concern without other-concern is like a tributary that has no outward flow to the ocean.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#26. A Church that has lost its voice for justice is a Church that has lost its relevance in the world.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#27. I would urge you to give priority to the search for God. Allow his spirit to permeate your being ... If you do not have a deep and patient faith in God, you will be powerless to face the delays, disappointments, and vicissitudes that inevitably come.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#28. Whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth,
Martin Luther King Jr.
#30. When you are right, you cannot be too radical; When you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#31. Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" and "Are you able to endure the ordeals of jail?"
Martin Luther King Jr.
#32. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#34. We must see the great distinction between a reform movement and a revolutionary movement. We are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society ... What America must be told today is that she must be born again. The whole structure of American life must be changed.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#35. Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#36. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#37. We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. This may well be mankind's last chance to choose between chaos and community.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#38. We aren't engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God's children. And that we don't have to live like we are forced to live.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#39. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for human 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.
#40. There are often multiple sources for some famous statements by King; as a professional speaker and minister he used some significant phrases with only slight variation many times in his
essays, books, and his speeches to different audiences.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#41. People are often led to causes and often become committed to great ideas through persons who personify those ideas. They have to find the embodiment of the idea in flesh and blood in order to commit themselves to it.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#43. We must stand up and say, "I'm black and I'm beautiful," and this self-affirmation is the black man's need, made compelling by the white man's crimes against him.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#44. Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#46. A second way that oppressed people sometimes deal with oppression is to resort to physical violence and corroding hatred.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#48. What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?
Martin Luther King Jr.
#49. [If] a man doesn't have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#50. Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#52. Where evil men would seek to perpetuate
an unjust status quo,
good men must seek to bring into being
a real order of justice.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#57. A man does not measure its height in moments of comfort, but in terms of change and controversy
Martin Luther King Jr.
#58. ...we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#64. Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can't win ... the view that American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#66. The larger society was willing to let the frustrations born of racism's violence become internalized and consume its victims. America's horror was only expressed when the aggression turned outward, when the ghetto and its controls could no longer contain its destructiveness.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#67. If we do an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we will be a blind and toothless nation.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#68. Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? - "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus."
Martin Luther King Jr.
#69. There is a magnificent new militancy within the Negro community all across this nation. And I welcome this as a marvelous development. The Negro of America is saying he's determined to be free and he is militant enough to stand up.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#71. The ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#73. We all can't be famous but we can all be great and we become great when we serve others
Martin Luther King Jr.
#74. Freedom is not won by a passive acceptance of suffering. Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering. By this measure, Negroes have not yet paid the full price for freedom. And whites have not yet faced the full cost of justice.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#75. In our society, it is psychological murder to deprive a man of a job ... you are in substance saying to that man You have no right to exist.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#77. True compassion is more than throwing a coin to a beggar. It demands of our humanity that if we live in a society that produces beggars, we are morally commanded to restructure that society.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#78. We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#80. Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#81. After we've discovered what God called us to do, after we've discovered our life's work, we should set out to do that work so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn't do it any better.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#83. We ain't what we oughta be. We ain't what we want to be. We ain't what we gonna be. But, thank God, we ain't what we was.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#84. In spite of its glowing talk about the welfare of the masses, Communism's methods and philosophy strip man of his dignity and worth, leaving him as little more than a depersonalized cog in the ever-turning wheel of the state.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#85. Be an artist at whatever you do. Even if you are a street sweeper, be the Michelangelo of street sweepers.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#86. My call to the ministry was not a miraculous or supernatural something. On the contrary it was an inner urge calling me to serve humanity.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#87. If we are going to achieve a real equality, the U.S. will have to adopt a modified form of Socialism.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#88. A man who does not have something for which he is willing to die is not fit to live.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#89. We decided to set our direct-action program around the Easter season, realizing that, with exception of Christmas, this was the largest shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic withdrawal program would be the by-product of direct action.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#90. Through our scientific and technological genius we've made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers - or we will all perish together as fools.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#93. Time has been used destructively by people of ill will much more than it has been used constructively by those of good will.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#94. As we have seen, the first public expression of disenchantment with nonviolence arose around the question of 'self-defense.' In a sense this is a false issue, for the right to defend one's home and one's person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#96. Somehow we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race which no one can win to a positive contest to harness man's creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all of the nations of the world.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#97. The purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#98. Nothing is so much needed as a secure family life for a people seeking to rise out of poverty and backwardness.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#99. It is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#100. If our economic system is to survive, there has to be a better distribution of wealth ... we can't have a system where some people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.
Martin Luther King Jr.
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