Quotes about Martin Luther King

62 Sourced Quotes

At the same time, I must personally say that I do question the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left wing associations.
The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country. If [there is] any place in the world we need Christianity, it's in Washington. And that's why preachers long since need to get over that intimidation forced upon us by liberals, that if we mention anything about politics, we are degrading our ministry.

Martin Luther King, with whom I worked very closely, became very distressed when a number of the ministers working for him wanted him to dismiss me from his staff because of my homosexuality.

I, with millions of other Americans, have the same dream Martin Luther King Jr. had; when I wake up I wish some of the things I dreamt would be true. I wish that little black and white boys and girls would hold hands without being shocked at their nearness to each other and say in a natural way, "we have overcome.

Even if there was a gun in my hand and he was standing in front of me, I would not shoot him. This is the compassion I have learned from Mohamed, the prophet of mercy, Jesus Christ and Lord Buddha. This the legacy of change I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. This is the philosophy of nonviolence that I have learned from Gandhi, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. And this is the forgiveness that I have learned from my father and from my mother. This is what my soul is telling me: be peaceful and love everyone.

Malala Yousafzai

If we love Martin Luther King, Jr., and respect him as this crowd surely testifies, let us see to it that he did not die in vain; let us see to it that we do not dishonor his name by trying to solve our problems through rioting in the streets. Violence was foreign to his nature.

Benjamin E. Mays

We need a new leader. We ain't had a black leader in a while.... We had Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and ever since then a bunch of substitute teachers.

When I was a boy, while watching the funeral procession of the Great Martin Luther King Jr. on NBC, I observed a rickety wooden cart being pulled by two mules and behind the cart, a sea of people. In the cart lay the body of MLK; at that moment, he represented the totality of the human struggle. I remember feeling then, while watching the procession on TV, that we, as a country, were either going to pull together or else come apart.

To use a telling phrase of the Reverend Martin Luther King, we can say that we have defaulted on a promissory note and now is the time to honor it.

It was not Martin Luther King who emancipated the modern Negro, but Stepin Fetchit.... It was Step, who elevated the Negro to the dignity of a Hollywood star. I made the Negro a first-class citizen all over the world.

On Martin Luther King, Jr. 's speech at the 1963 March on Washington:

At that moment it seemed as if the Kingdom of God appeared. But it only lasted for a moment.

Coretta Scott King

Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Kennedys—there is always a pattern where a piece of information is destroyed, in which a witness is killed. It's so predictable, you can go back and look up old cases.

If Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins or any of these compromising Negros who say exactly what the white man wants to hear is interviewed anywhere in the country you don't get anybody to offset what they say. But whenever a black man stands up and says something that white people don't like then the first thing that man does is run around to try and find somebody to say something to offset what has just been said. This is natural but it is done.

Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are great examples of fantastic nonviolents who died violently. I can never work that out. We're pacifists, but I'm not sure what it means when you're such a pacifist that you get shot. I can never understand that.

Society has always been the free man's greatest enemy. And the free man has been society's greatest friend. How did society treat Jesus, Socrates, Galileo, or Martin Luther King? Yet look what they have left behind.

That's part of our policy, is not to be taken seriously, because I think our opposition, whoever they may be, in all their manifest forms, don't know how to handle humor. You know, and we are humorous, we are, what are they, Laurel and Hardy. That's John and Yoko, and we stand a better chance under that guise, because all the serious people, like Martin Luther King, and Kennedy, and Gandhi, got shot.

Often, we feel that we need a leader outside of ourselves -a Buddha, a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King, Jr.- to show the way. But we have the Buddha inside of us. We have Gandhi and King inside of us as well. We are interconnected. We don't need to wait for some other person to be the change we want to see in the world

Let it never be said by future generations that indifference, cynicism or selfishness made us fail to live up to the ideals of humanism which the Nobel Peace Prize encapsulates. Let the strivings of us all, prove Martin Luther King Jr. to have been correct, when he said that humanity can no longer be tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war.

And I've always believed in what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the fierce urgency of now — we should not fear change, we should embrace it.

Moral courage... is always defined by the state as treason.... It is the courage to act and speak the truth. Thompson had it. Daniel Ellsburg had it. Malcolm X had it. Martin Luther King had it. What those in authority once said about them they say today about Snowden.

Howard Fineman: The people who don't pay their taxes on principle are heroic people, in the manner of Gandhi and Martin Luther King?
Ron Paul: I think if they're defending the constitution and they know what they're doing, and this money is supporting some real evil in the world. Preemptive war? That's pretty evil as far as I'm concerned. And so much waste in a system of government that has just overrun our liberties? Yes, I think that in many ways it's heroic for people willing to risk their freedom in order to defend what they believe is freedom.

They call us murderers, but we did not murder Martin Luther King, Jr., Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Nat Turner, James Chaney, and countless others. We did not murder, by shooting in the back, sixteen-year-old Rita Lloyd, eleven-year-old Rickie Bodden, or ten-year-old Clifford Glover. They call us murderers, but we do not control or enforce a system of racism and oppression that systematically murders Black and Third World people. Although Black people supposedly comprise about fifteen percent of the total amerikkkan population, at least sixty percent of murder victims are Black. For every pig that is killed in the so-called line of duty, there are at least fifty Black people murdered by the police.

There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.

I know there was so much talk in school about my daddy and people were afraid to talk to me. They thought I was stuck up. They didn't know me, had never talked to me, but just because I was Martin Luther King's daughter, I had to be stuck up and I wouldn't be able to talk to them.

My last vestige of "hands-off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11, 2001, followed by the "National Day of Prayer", when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonation and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.

Richard Dawkins

On Barack Obama: "No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush's wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush's warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King's legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous 'Change you can believe in,' it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. 'We will be the most powerful,' he often declared."