Martin Luther King Quotes
Civil rights leader in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. For his activities, he became the youngest man ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. An assassin's bullet claimed his life in 1968.
(1929 - 1968)
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...And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man.
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A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
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A man can't ride your back unless it's bent.
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A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.
[Death]
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A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.
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A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
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A right delayed is a right denied.
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A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.
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All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
[Work]
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All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.
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All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
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All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.
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Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.
[Better]
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An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
[Above]
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An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
[Community]
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An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.
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As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked - and rightly so - what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government.
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As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free.
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At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
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