“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person of yourself.”
―
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
“Capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Our only hope lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“„Понякога
в живота има моменти на неизразимо удоволствие, което не може напълно
да бъде обяснено със тези символи, наречени думи. Тяхното значение може
да бъде изразено само от недоловимият език на сърцето.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“But I am also concerned about our moral uprightness and the health of our souls. Therefore I must oppose any attempt to gain our freedom by the methods of malice, hate, and violence that have characterized our oppressors. Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Many of our inner conflicts are rooted in hate. This is why psychiatrists say, “Love or perish.” Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“...law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr
“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
“A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact, and say: “This is not just.” It will look across the oceans and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing to prevent us from paying adequate wages to schoolteachers, social workers and other servants of the public to insure that we have the best available personnel in these positions which are charged with the responsibility of guiding our future generations. There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.”
―
Martin Luther King Jr