“We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“On the parable of the Good Samaritan: "I imagine that the first question the priest and Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“To have serpentlike qualities devoid of dovelike qualities is to be passionless, mean, and selfish. To have dovelike without serpentlike qualities is to be sentimental, anemic, and aimless. We must combine strongly marked antitheses.”
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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
“Today it is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence; it is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”
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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.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies...but the silence of our friends.
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Martin Luther King Jr
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“Japan knows the horror of war and has suffered as no other nation under the cloud of nuclear disaster. Certainly Japan can stand strong for a world of peace.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
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Martin Luther King Jr
“I am tired of seeing people battered and bruised and bloody, injured and jumped on, along the Jericho Roads of life.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr