Quotes By Martin Luther King Jr

Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results.

Nonviolence in the civil rights struggle has meant not relying on arms and weapons of struggle. It has meant noncooperation with customs and laws which are institutional aspects of a regime of discrimination and enslavement.

Nonviolence has also meant that my people in the agonizing struggles of recent years have taken suffering upon themselves instead of inflicting it on others.

The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites.

With patient and firm determination we will press on until every valley of despair is exalted to new peaks of hope, until every mountain of pride and irrationality is made low by the leveling process of humility and compassion

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul.

When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.

I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land.

I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men.

I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow.

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind.

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time - the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.

Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

There are some things that are as basic and as structural in history, and if we don't know these things, we are in danger of destroying ourselves and our world.