“If it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music ... Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“Without love, there is no reason to know anyone, for love will in the end connect us to our neighbors, our children and our hearts.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“For you will never be what you ought to be until they [your fellow humans] are what they ought to be.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“I am convinced that even violent temperaments can be channeled through nonviolent discipline, if they can act constructively and express through an effective channel their very legitimate anger.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr