Martin Luther King Jr Quotes
411 Martin Luther King Jr Quotes
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Recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That’s your new definition of greatness. . . The thing that I like about it. . . by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great because everybody can serve.
Martin Luther King Jr
If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains. I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.
Martin Luther King Jr
Tension and conflict are not alien nor abnormal to growth but are the natural results of the process of changes. A revolution is occurring in both the social order and the human mind.
Martin Luther King Jr
One of the sure signs of maturity is the ability to rise to the point of self criticism.
Martin Luther King Jr
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken--the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.
Martin Luther King Jr
We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Martin Luther King Jr
Our present urgent necessity is to cease our internal fighting and turn outward to the enemy, using every form of mass action yet known---create new forms--and resolve never to let them rest. This is the social lever which will force open the door to freedom. Our powerful weapons are the voices, the feet, and the bodies of dedicated, united people, moving without rest toward a just goal.
Martin Luther King Jr
You can never stand in a position of leadership without opposition. My attitude is that this can sometimes be healthy because it keeps you in a constant state of examining yourself, your motives and methods. I always try to take criticism in a positive sense. . .
Martin Luther King Jr
The greater the privileges, the greater the responsibilities and sacrifices.
Martin Luther King Jr
Whatever career you may choose for yourself-- doctor, lawyer, teacher -- let me propose an avocation to be pursued along with it. Become a dedicated fighter for civil rights.
Martin Luther King Jr
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
Martin Luther King Jr
We need organizations that are permeated with mutual trust, incorruptibility and militancy. Without this spirit we may have numbers but they will add up to zero.
Martin Luther King Jr
We need organizations that are responsible, efficient and alert.
Martin Luther King Jr
We lack experience because ours is a history of disorganization. But we will prevail because our need for progress is stronger than the ignorance forced upon us.
Martin Luther King Jr
If we realize how indispensable is responsible militant organization to our struggle, we will create it as we managed to create underground railroads, protest groups, self-help societies and the churches that have always been our refuge.
Martin Luther King Jr
We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu—a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.
Martin Luther King Jr
The shape of the world today does not permit us a faltering democracy.
Martin Luther King Jr
He who sells you the token instead of the coin always retains the power to revoke its worth, and to command you to get off the bus before you have reached your destination. Tokenism is a promise to pay. Democracy, in its finest sense, is payment.
Martin Luther King Jr
All inhabitants of the globe are now neighbors. This world-wide neighborhood has been brought into being largely as a result of the modern scientific and technological revolutions.
Martin Luther King Jr
Wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. . .If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survival, then we must find an alternative to war.
Martin Luther King Jr
Nothing could be more tragic than for men to live in these revolutionary times and fail to achieve the new attitude and the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands.
Martin Luther King Jr
Today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change.
Martin Luther King Jr
One of the great problems of mankind is we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.
Martin Luther King Jr
Every (person) lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external.
Martin Luther King Jr
Every step towards the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
Martin Luther King Jr
Actually time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but the for appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King Jr
We must develop, from strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us.
Martin Luther King Jr
When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance when they have accumulated the power to enforce change………… The powerful never lose opportunities--they remain available to them. The powerless, on the other hand, never experience opportunity - it is always arriving at a later time.
Martin Luther King Jr
Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love.
Martin Luther King Jr
Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands.
Martin Luther King Jr
When a new dawn reveals a landscape dotted with obstacles, the time has come for sober reflection, for assessment of our methods and for anticipating pitfalls. Stumbling and groping through the wilderness finally must be replaced by a planned, organized and orderly march.
Martin Luther King Jr
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.
Martin Luther King Jr
When an individual is no longer a true participant, when he no longer feels a sense of responsibility to his society, the content of democracy is emptied.
Martin Luther King Jr
Racism is a tenacious evil, but it is not immutable.
Martin Luther King Jr
None of us can pretend that he knows all the answers. It is enormously difficult for any oppressed people even to arrive at an awareness of their latent strengths. They are not only buffeted by defeats, but they have been schooled assiduously to believe in their lack of capacity. People struggling from the depths of society have not been equipped with knowledge of the science of social change. Only when they break out of the fog of self-denigration can they begin to discover the forms of action that influence events. They can then embark on social experimentation with their own strengths to generate the kind of power that shapes basic decisions.
Martin Luther King Jr
In our society power sources are sometimes obscure and indistinct. Yet they can always finally be traced to those forces we describe as ideological, economic and political.
Martin Luther King Jr
Nonviolent direct action will continue to be a significant source of power until it is made irrelevant by the presence of justice.
Martin Luther King Jr
[The black community has] already started on this road in creating the protest movement, but this is only a beginning. We must involve everyone we can reach, even those with inadequate education, and together acquire political sophistication by discussion, practice and reading.
Martin Luther King Jr
Informal discussions and reading at home or in the streets are educational; they challenge the mind and inform our actions.
Martin Luther King Jr
Midnight is the hour when men desperately seek to obey the eleventh commandment, Thou shalt not get caught. According to the ethic of midnight, the cardinal sin is to be caught and the cardinal virtue is to get by.
Martin Luther King Jr
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