Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will.

Truth crushed to earth will rise again.

You cannot solve the problem by turning to communism, for communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept.

Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement, not replace, the progress of change. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force.

Please be peaceful. We believe in law and order. We are not advocating violence, I want you to love your enemies... for what we are doing is right, what we are doing is just -- and God is with us.

Had it not been for the ministry of my good friend Dr. Billy Graham, my work in the civil rights movement would not have been as successful as it has been.

What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?

Time has been used destructively by people of ill will much more than it has been used constructively by those of good will.

When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism.

We can either walk the highroad of brotherhood or the low road of man's inhumanity to man.

The Negro is the child of two cultures - Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is: what are you doing for others? Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.

Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.

Babies, we are told, are the latest news from heaven.

Courage faces fear and thereby masters it

I have condemned any organizer of war, regardless of his rank or nationality.

Power at its best is love implementing the demand of justice.

Even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.

Man must never be treated as a means to the end of the state, but always as an end within himself.

As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free.

Many men cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace.

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable . . .

Darkness is only driven out with light, not more darkness.

Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

Carve a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.

Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.

Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves.

Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable

But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.

Seeing is not always believing.

We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

I just want to leave a committed life behind.

Money, like any other force such as electricity, is amoral and can be used for either good or evil.

My faith in man is, at bottom, a faith in God.

God has given each normal person a capacity to achieve some end. True, some are endowed with more talent than others, but God has left none of us talentless.

Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.

Alienation is a form of living death. It is the acid of despair that dissolves society.

The road to freedom is a difficult, hard road. It always makes for temporary setbacks.

Our problem is not to be rid of fear but rather to harness and master it.

We need not join the mad rush to purchase an earthly fallout shelter. God is our eternal fallout shelter. From Strength to Love, 1963

Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? - "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free."

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

There's something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.

"I criticize America because I love her. I want her to stand as a moral example to the world."

I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.

For all of us today, the battle is in our hands. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways to lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. We must keep going.

I am not afraid of the word tension.

[People] don't see that there's a great deal of a difference between nonresistance to evil and nonviolent resistance.