Martin Luther Jr. King (1929-1968)

Quotes

• The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.

• Segregation is the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.

• 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 the law.

• Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.

• It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

• If a man hasn't discovered something that he would die for, he isn't fit to live.

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

• Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

• If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

• If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

• Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.

• 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.

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

• The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

• We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

• 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.

• Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

• A lie cannot live.

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

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