Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes (170 Quotes)


    One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

    We cannot be truly Christian people so long as we flaunt the central teachings of Jesus brotherly love and the Golden Rule.

    It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

    We will speed the day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing ... 'Free at last, Free at last, Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last.'

    The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.


    Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power.

    It is quite easy for me to think of a God of love mainly because I grew up in a family where love was central and where lovely relationships were ever present.

    The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.

    I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.

    The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

    I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

    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 are created equal.'

    The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

    In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

    Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.


    I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

    I'm grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle.

    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 the law.

    Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here.

    To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.

    All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.


    We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

    The great event on Calvary ... is an eternal reminder to a power drunk generation that love is the most durable power in the world, and that it is at bottom the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. Only through achieving this love can you expect to matriculate into the university of eternal life.


    Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. Not a few men who cherish lofty and noble ideas hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different.

    The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

    And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.'

    A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.



    We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.

    He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.


    Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time the need for mankind to overcome oppression andviolence without resorting to oppression and violence.

    We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.


    Yes, I see the Church as the body of Christ. But, oh How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.



    It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

    Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.

    If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values - that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

    A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.


    Morality cannot be legislated but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.


    America experiences a new birth of freedom in her sons and daughters she incarnates the spirit of her martyred chief. Their loyalty is repledged their devotion renewed to the work He left unfinished. My heart throbs anew in the hope that inspired by the example of Lincoln, imbued with the spirit of Christ, they will cast down the last barrier to perfect freedom. And I with my brother of blackest hue possessing at last my rightful heritage and holding my head erect, may stand beside the Saxon a Negro and yet a man.



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