“The end of life is not to be happy, nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what may.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win, and their participants know it.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“This is the unusual thing about nonviolence -- nobody is defeated, everybody shares in the victory.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“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.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
