“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy-five and yet not ever truly to have lived.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North which is truly liberal, a liberalism that firmly believes in integration in its own community as well as in the Deep South. It is one thing to agree that the goal of integration is morally and legally right; it is another thing to commit oneself positively and actively to the ideal of integration—the former is intellectual assent, the latter is actual belief. These are days that demand practices to match professions. This is no day to pay lip service to integration; we must pay life service to it.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Instinctively we struck out for dignity first because personal degradation as an inferior human being was even more keenly felt than material privation.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“We must condemn those who are perpetuating the violence, and not the individuals who engage in the pursuit of their constitutional rights.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and think critically. Intelligence plus character; that is the goal of a true education.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. 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.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
