Quotes about Martin Luther King

62 Sourced Quotes

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.

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles away from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
And everyday my government gives me a count of corpses created by the military service in Vietnam. So it goes.
My father died many years ago now — of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.

[Belafonte]'d take me to perform for Martin Luther King's cause. But when they were marching I did not take part, because I was not a citizen

A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back — but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.

Marian Wright Edelman

With the election behind us, our country turns hopeful eyes to the future. I have a few hopes of my own. I congratulate our first African-American president-elect. Martin Luther King, Jr. certainly would be proud to see this day. We are stronger for embracing diversity, and I am hopeful that we can continue working through the tensions and wrongs of the past and become a more just and colorblind society. I hope this new administration will help bring us together, and not further divide us. I have always found that freedom is the best way to break down barriers. A free society emphasizes the importance of individuals, and not because they are part of a certain group. That's the only way equal justice can be achieved.

My dad turned 40 in October 1967 … in April '68 Martin Luther King was killed. In June '68 Robert Kennedy was killed. And in the fall of '68, my dad's mother died. He was left, on an existential level, saying, "This is what I am. I've got the love of my students and I've got nothing else. My country is going to hell." After 1968, he was never the same again. All the air went out of him.

We know that these challenges can be overcome because history moves in the direction of justice. The evils of slavery were accepted and unchanged for centuries, yet eventually the human heart would not abide them. There is a voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced, what Martin Luther King called a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. That flame could not be extinguished at the Birmingham jail. It could not be stamped out at Robben Island prison. It was seen in the darkness here at Goree Island, where no chain could bind the soul. This untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of man, and it lights the way before us. May God bless you all.

Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day, are in one way or another about being thankful.

Jonathan Safran Foer

"Love is the only weapon." Shit! Bullshit! Martin Luther King died with love! Kennedy died talking about something he couldn't even understand, some kind of generalized love, and he never even backed it up. He was shot down. Bullshit! "Love is the only weapon with which I've got to fight." I've got a hell of a lot of weapons to fight! I've got my claws. I've got cutlasses. I've got guns. I've got dynamite. I've got a hell of a lot to fight! I'll fight! I'll fight!

The Civil Rights Movement was not a mirage; it was not a documentary; it was not even a television special; it was live and in living color. It should not surprise us that it was a woman who sparked the movement. If Rosa Parks had not chosen to stand up that day in December 1955 by remaining seated on that bus in Montgomery, we would not be here today celebrating the life of Martin Luther King Jr. But that was the incident that propelled him into leadership and ultimately triggered the ending of segregation in the South. The doors of educational and employment opportunities were opened and blacks, Hispanics, and women of all races streamed in on an unprecedented basis.

I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.

Coretta Scott King

They want a race war. We must be peaceful people. They are gonna poke and poke and poke, and our government is going to stand by and let them do it. We must be — we must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe that Martin Luther King believed in, "Kill all white babies."

On January 20, as we observed my father's eighty fifth birthday and the King holiday, my brothers Dexter Scott King and Martin Luther King III notified me that they want to sell our father's most prized possessions; his personal traveling bible and Nobel Peace Prize awarded fifty years ago this year. The same bible that President Barack Obama was inaugurated on for his second term in office, in which he signed afterwards.

There is a reason that I require all new agents and analysts to study the FBI's interaction with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and to visit his memorial in Washington as part of their training. And there is a reason I keep on my desk a copy of Attorney General Robert Kennedy's approval of J. Edgar Hoover's request to wiretap Dr. King. It is a single page. The entire application is five sentences long, it is without fact or substance, and is predicated on the naked assertion that there is communist influence in the racial situation. The reason I do those things is to ensure that we remember our mistakes and that we learn from them.

Our third American Tragedy is Martin Luther King. King was Mario Cuomo and Stevenson another way. Oh, he had some Roosevelt will to power, but Cuomo has a will to power, and Stevenson had a little, maybe more than I'm giving him credit for. He was who you wanted it to be, in a way. Old America. We're singing spirituals again. We're having dreams again. Well, that left mechanization entirely out of the question. There was no Hollywood there. There were no gangsters there. There was no World War II victory there. I hope everyone understands I'm being completely nonracist when I say he was Adlai Stevenson another way.

George W. S. Trow

I wouldn't be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and firehoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn't be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, some of us go to jail just like Martin Luther King did on trumped up charges. Tough times are coming.

Our century of war, militarism, and political terror has produced great — and successful — advocates of true peace, among whom Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are the paramount examples. The considerable success that they achieved testifies to the presence, in the midst of violence, of an authentic and powerful desire for peace and, more important, of the proven will to make the necessary sacrifices.

I was in Washington in the summer of 1963, [and] had the opportunity to participate in Dr. Martin Luther King's March on Washington, which culminated at the Lincoln memorial in his soaring 'I Have a Dream' speech. For me, this was America at its best. Hundreds of thousands of us, all religions, races, and nationalities, joined together peacefully but powerfully to petition our government to right the wrong of racial bigotry.

If you think about Martin Luther King and others in the leadership of the Civil Rights movement, they were all college-educated, middle class people. Nobody tries to diminish the Civil Rights movement by saying they were middle class.
It's true that the National Organization for Women in its early years was white middle class. But once it was joined by younger women from civil rights groups like SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) it changed profoundly. In any case, my life's ambition is to make white women as smart as black women. Because the group of women who still vote against their own self-interest are white married women.

Men are likely to be not only the warriors of war but also the warriors of peace. Almost all those who risk their lives, are put in jail, or are killed for peace are men. While some of the peace warriors—Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Dag Hammarskjold—are remembered, most are forgotten. Remember Norm Morrison? After years of protesting the Vietnam war, Norm doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire on the steps of the Pentagon[…] But Norm Morrison is forgotten.

His headstone said FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST But death is a slave's freedom We seek the freedom of free men And the construction of a world Where Martin Luther King could have lived and preached nonviolence.

It is the anniversary of the 'I Have a Dream' speech from Martin Luther King. And what an appropriate day. At first we picked that date, we didn't know and I thought, "oh jeez." But now I think it was almost divine providence. I do. His dream has been so corrupted. Judge a man by the content of his character. Character doesn't even matter anymore in this country. It's time we picked that dream back up and finished the job.

On all levels of life and as each day unfolds, respect for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. grows impressively, and the essence of this respect is the fact that he had deeper insights than most of us have appreciated. It is not mere poetry to call him prophetic. The accuracy of his prophecies is almost uncanny.
By the early 1950's history had endowed him with a sense of the precise moment that Black people were ready for mass action, ready for its risks, and ready for its responsibilities.

Harry Belafonte

The irony is that Barack Obama would not even be president if it were not for the courage of persecuted dissidents such as Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, spied upon by their own government. But Obama understands where power lies. It does not lie with the citizen. It lies with Wall Street and our corporate boardrooms, which have carried out a slow motion coup d'état. And a system of mass surveillance is designed to keep these elites in these boardrooms powerful and the rest of us powerless.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening, because I have some — some very sad news for all of you — Could you lower those signs, please? — I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Robert F. Kennedy