The Negro all over the South must come to the point that he can say to his white brother 'We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force.'
The Negro all over the South must come to the point that he can say to his white brother 'We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force.'
Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'
If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
A right delayed is a right denied.
One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.
Forgiveness is not an occasional act it is a permanent attitude.
Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.
Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.
I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
From the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire, let freedom ring. From the mighty mountains of New York, let freedom ring. From the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania, let freedom ring .... Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill....
We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
We are not makers of history. We are made by history.
Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But... the good Samaritan reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"
Even though I have never had an abrupt conversion experience, religion has been real to me and closely knitted to life. In fact the two cannot be separated religion for me is life.
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse. The true with the false and the false with the true.
Our forebears labored without wages. They made cotton 'king.' And yet out of a bottomless vitality, they continued to thrive and develop.
Most of these people will never make the headlines and their names will not appear in Who's Who. Yet when years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age in which we live men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization because these humble children of God were willing to suffer for righteousness' sake.
The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.
We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights.
If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolute night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.
I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
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.
Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.
The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth century prophets left their little villages and carried their 'thus saith the Lord' far beyond the boundaries of their home towns and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Graeco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.
Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy five and yet not ever truly to have lived.
I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.
Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.
If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now surely fail. ... Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned tho' we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny.
The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.
If a man hasn't discovered something that he would die for, he isn't fit to live.
I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.
We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.
When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.
Riots are the language of the unheard.
A man can't ride your back unless it's bent.
The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories