“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“I always contended that we as a race must not seek to rise from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, but to create a moral balance in society where democracy and brotherhood would be reality for all men.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“History may be a nightmare—an endless cycle of violence and oppression. Old victims of domination soon became new perpetrators of domination. We have seen this cycle over and over again: American revolutionaries dominating Indigenous peoples and defending slavery, anti-colonial heroes becoming dictators, anti-racists supporting patriarchy and homophobia, liberals crusading for imperial invasion and occupation. Such a nightmare radically calls into question the power of radical love in human history. For King, if we accept such a nightmare, then only self-destruction awaits us. To dream is to hold death at arm’s length. To love is to really be alive in history. Without radical love, nihilism triumphs—“power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“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.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“All too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows”
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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.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“When I took up the cross I recognized it's meaning. The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately, that you die on.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“it is just as wrong, or even perhaps more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“When you are right, you cannot be too radical; When you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
