“For you will never be what you ought to be until they [your fellow humans] are what they ought to be.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“When you are right, you cannot be too radical; When you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.”
―
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
“The time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us today...
...some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Violence brings only temporary victories; violence, by creating many more social problems than it solves, never brings permanent peace.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Lamentably, it is a historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. ... A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
