Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes

618 Sourced Quotes

The Negro is the child of two cultures - Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission - a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man".

Martin Luther King, Jr.
All too many of those who live in affluent America ignore those who exist in poor America; in doing so, the affluent Americans will eventually have to face themselves with the question that Eichman chose to ignore: How responsible am I for the well-being of my fellows?

Martin Luther King, Jr.
I think there can be a collective leadership. Maybe some symbolize the struggle [for human's rights] a little more than others, but I think it's absolutely necessary for the leadership to be united in order to make the revolution effective.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that's
the strong person.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
The job of the school is to teach so well that family background is no longer an issue.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Another reason why we must love our enemies is that hate scars the soul and distorts the personality.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
I think that we've got to come to see this. The Negro is an American.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
I'm thinking of love in action and not something where you say, "Love your enemies," and just leave it at that, but you love your enemies to the point that you're willing to sit-in at a lunch counter in order to help them find themselves. You're willing to go to jail.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-antirevolutionaries.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, 'Love your enemies.' It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
I still have a dream today that one day war will come to an end, that men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, that nations will no longer rise up against nations, neither will they study war any more.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
There's another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates.... For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That's what hate does.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
I think the inconveniences of a segregated education are much greater than the inconveniences of busing students so that they can get an integrated quality education.

Martin Luther King, Jr.