Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr Quotes

Through violence, you may murder the hater, but you do not murder the hate.

The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.

Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. [...] You only need a heart full of grace.

There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.

If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody he's traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain.

Courage is the power of the mind to overcome fear.

We have guided missiles and misguided men.

The labor movement was the principal force that transforme­d misery and despair into hope and progress.

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer

Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.

Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.

It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless.

Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil.

If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed; We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal

Justice too long delayed is justice denied.

I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism.

Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve.

All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

I choose to give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity

You only need a heart full of grace

If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.

He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lives a great street-sweeper who did his job well'

We can dream of an America, and a world, in which love and not money are civilization's bottom line.

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.

I may not be the man I want to be; I may not be the man I ought to be; I may not be the man I could be; I may not be the man I truly can be; but praise God, I'm not the man I once was

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

You can have no influence over those for whom you have underlying contempt.

Segregation is the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.

We aren't going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.

Freedom has always been an expensive thing. History is fit testimony to the fact that freedom is rarely gained without sacrifice and self-denial.

When people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory.

The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.

It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends 500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only 53 annually on the victims of poverty.

It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.

The church must be reminded that it is not the master, or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.

Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

The ability to lead a happy life is made, not found

At the heart of all that civilization has meant and developed is 'community' - the mutually cooperative and voluntary venture of man to assume a semblance of responsibility for his brother.

But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.

The greatness of our God lies in the fact that [He] is both tough minded and tender hearted.

Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.

The supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.

Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

The government can't make people love me, but it can keep them from lynching me.