“If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music ... Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“First, we must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. It is impossible even to begin the act of loving one’s enemies without the prior acceptance of the necessity, over and over again, of forgiving those who inflict evil and injury upon us. It is also necessary to realize that the forgiving act must always be initiated by the person who has been wronged, the victim of some great hurt, the recipient of some tortuous injustice, the absorber of some terrible act of oppression. The wrongdoer may request forgiveness. He may come to himself, and, like the prodigal son, move up some dusty road, his heart palpitating with the desire for forgiveness. But only the injured neighbor, the loving father back home, can really pour out the warm waters of forgiveness.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“The Negro’s economic problem was compounded by the emergence and growth of automation. Since discrimination and lack of education confined him to unskilled and semi-skilled labor, the Negro was and remains the first to suffer in these days of great technological development.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Anyone who lives inside the US can never be considered an outsider anywhere in the country”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“We must condemn those who are perpetuating the violence, and not the individuals who engage in the pursuit of their constitutional rights.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“As if the weight of such a commitment to life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
