“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
―
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
“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. Today, our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“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.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person of yourself.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny. To a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“One of the greatest paradoxes of the Black Power movement was that it talked unceasingly about not imitating the values of white society, but in advocating violence it was imitating the worst, the most brutal, and the most uncivilized value of American life. American Negroes had not been mass murderers. They had not murdered children in Sunday school, nor had they hung white men on trees bearing strange fruit. They had not been hooded perpetrators of violence, lynching human beings at will and drowning them at whim.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“A Mrs. Hipp said vehemently that I had insulted her by implying that she, along with other white members of the committee, had come to the meeting with a closed mind. I tried to make it clear that my statement applied only to those people whose public pronouncements were antiNegro, and not to the committee as a whole, but to no avail. They continued to look at me as though I were the cause of the stalemate.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr