“If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“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.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“We can all get more together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power. Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to effect change, and we need power.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“One of the greatest paradoxes of the Black Power movement was that it talked unceasingly about not imitating the values of white society, but in advocating violence it was imitating the worst, the most brutal, and the most uncivilized value of American life. American Negroes had not been mass murderers. They had not murdered children in Sunday school, nor had they hung white men on trees bearing strange fruit. They had not been hooded perpetrators of violence, lynching human beings at will and drowning them at whim.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Through our scientific and technological genius we've made of this world a neighborhood. And now through our moral and ethical commitment we must make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers—or we will all perish together as fools.”
―
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
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win, and their participants know it.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“noncooperation with evil is just as much a moral duty as is cooperation with good.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right if the head is totally wrong. Only through the bringing together of head and heart—intelligence and goodness—shall man rise to a fulfillment of his true nature.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
