Martin Luther King Jr.

Quotes

• “When the majority of the country could not live with the extremes of brutality they witnessed, political remedies were e...”
• “We all have the drum major instinct. We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the...”
• “Now, I'm not talking about a sentimental, shallow kind of love. I'm not talking about eros, which is a sort of aesthetic...”
• “Variants (Many of MLKs' speeches were delivered many times with slight variants): An Individual has not started living f...”
• “Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can i...”
• “Finally, the proper religious faith gives you this type of balance and this type of perspective that I'm talking about. ...”
• “I'm more convinced than ever before that violence can not solve the problems of the world. Violence is both impractical ...”
• “You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by the iron feet of oppression. There co...”
• “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. ...”
• “We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egy...”
• “An even more basic reason why we are commanded to love is expressed explicitly in Jesus' words, "love your enemies....th...”
• “I don't mind telling you this morning that sometimes I feel discouraged. I felt discouraged in Chicago. As I move throug...”
• “And then the final great tragedy of the distorted personality is the fact that when one fails to harness this instinct, ...”
• “The Emancipation Proclamation shattered in one blow the slave system, undermining the foundations of the economy of the ...”
• “That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It's not ...”
• “Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. Indeed, it is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and enn...”
• “Negroes could contain their rage when they found the means to force relatively radical changes in their environment. / I...”
• “Now most serious thinkers acknowledge that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of dis...”
• “I want to continue the series of sermons this morning that I started several weeks ago. The series dealing with problems...”
• “[N]o matter where you stand, no matter how much popularity you have, no matter how much education you have, no matter ho...”
• “Third we must not seek to defeat or humiliate the enemy but to win his friendship and understanding. At times we are abl...”
• “We've been in the mountain of war. We've been in the mountain of violence. We've been in the mountain of hatred long eno...”
• “We come humbly to say to the men in the forefront of our government that the civil rights issue is not an Ephemeral, eva...”
• “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical re...”
• “An individual gets away from this type of self-centeredness when he pauses enough to see that no matter what he does in ...”
• “The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to a world, organized politically and spiritually around the concept of the i...”
• “Ghana has something to say to us. It says to us first, that the oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppress...”
• “Most people think King would be the last person to own a gun. Yet in the mid-1950s, as the civil rights movement heated ...”
• “I never will forget one night very late. It was around midnight... the telephone started ringing and I picked it up. On ...”
• “Your ultimate allegiance is not to the government, not to the state, not to nation, not to any man-made institution. The...”
• “There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is re...”
• “One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there a...”
• “If there is one thing that captures popular understanding of the Jewish community's relationship to the Rev. Martin Luth...”
• “We too know the Jesus that the minister referred to. We have had an experience with him and we believe firmly in the rev...”
• “I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh fro...”
• “We are here, we are here this evening because we're tired now. And I want to say that we are not here advocating violenc...”
• “The trouble with Communism is that it has neither a theology nor a Christology; therefore it emerges with a mixed-up ant...”
• “I happen to be a pacifist but if I had had to make a decision about fighting a war against Hitler, I may have temporaril...”
• “An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizons of his particular individualistic concer...”
• “Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the ti...”
• “A host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the in...”
• “Let us therefore continue our triumphal march to the realization of the American dream.... for all of us today, the batt...”
• “When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we w...”
• “We can be slow as well to give greatness its due, a mistake I made myself long ago when I voted against a federal holida...”
• “We believe it is imperative that farm laborers, among the most abused and neglected of all American workers, be included...”
• “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a si...”
• “This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we c...”
• “And in a real sense this afternoon, we can say that our feet are tired, but our souls are rested. They told us we wouldn...”
• “Whatever we do, we must keep God in the forefront. Let us be Christian in all of our actions. But I want to tell you thi...”
• “Let the strivings of us all, prove Martin Luther King Jr. to have been correct, when he said that humanity can no longer...”