Martin Luther King, Jr. - Strength to Love (1963)

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Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
God has given each normal person a capacity to achieve some end. True, some are endowed with more talent than others, but God has left none of us talentless.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life's persistent and most urgent question is 'What are you doing for others?'

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Our problem is not to be rid of fear but rather to harness and master it.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!

Martin Luther King, Jr.
The words 'I will forgive you, but I'll never forget what you've done' never explain the real nature of forgiveness.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent, we are interdependent.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Softmindedness often invades religion. … Softminded persons have revised the Beautitudes to read "Blessed are the pure in ignorance: for they shall see God." This has led to a widespread belief that there is a conflict between science and religion. But this is not true. There may be a conflict between softminded religionists and toughminded scientists, but not between science and religion. … Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation — either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
We must constantly build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Money, like any other force such as electricity, is amoral and can be used for either good or evil.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right when the head is totally wrong

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jesus recognized the need for blending opposites. He knew that his disciples would face a difficult and hostile world, where they would confront the recalcitrance of political officials and the intransigence of the protectors of the old order. He knew that they would meet cold and arrogant men whose hearts had been hardened by the long winter of traditionalism. … And he gave them a formula for action, "Be ye therefore as wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." … We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word... Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
By opening our lives to God in Christ, we become new creatures. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists... Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
There is little hope for us until we become toughminded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of softmindedness. A nation or a civilization that continues to produce softminded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.
But we must not stop with the cultivation of a tough mind. The gospel also demands a tender heart. … What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of toughmindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hardheartedness?

Martin Luther King, Jr.
This faith transforms the whirlwind of despair into a warm and reviving breeze of hope. The words of a motto which a generation ago were commonly found on the wall in the homes of devout persons need to be etched on our hearts: Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. There was no one there.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Christianity affirms that at the heart of reality is a Heart, a loving Father who works through history for the salvation of His children. Man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of all things and humanity is not God. Bound by the chains of his own sin and finiteness, man needs a Savior.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Courage and cowardice are antithetical. Courage is an inner resolution to go forward in spite of obstacles and frightening situations; cowardice is a submissive surrender to circumstance.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
The softminded person always wants to freeze the moment and hold life in the gripping yoke of sameness.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Some years ago Professor Bixler reminded us of the danger of overstressing the well-adjusted life. Everybody passionately seeks to be well-adjusted. We must, of course, be well-adjusted to avoid neurotic schizophrenic personalities, but there are some things in our world to which men of goodwill must be maladjusted. I confess that I never intend to become adjusted to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men of work and food, and the to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
If we assume that mankind has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war and destruction. In our day of space vehicles and guided ballistic missiles, the choice is either nonviolence or nonexistence.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Life's most persistent and urgent question is: what are you doing for others?

Martin Luther King, Jr.