“...and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky...”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“This is the unusual thing about nonviolence -- nobody is defeated, everybody shares in the victory.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“My friends, we cannot win the respect of the white people of the South or elsewhere if we are willing to trade the future of our children for our personal safety or comfort. Moreover, we must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil. ... 'Put up thy sword.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“The potential beauty of human life is constantly made ugly by man's ever-recurring song of retaliation.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“No one can pretend that because a people may be oppressed, every individual member is virtuous and worthy.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent—and often even vocal—sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“When I took up the cross I recognized it's meaning. The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately, that you die on.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
