Quotes By Martin Luther King Jr

If a city has a 30% Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30% of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas.

I live with one deep concern: Am I making the right decisions? Sometimes I am uncertain, and I must look to God for guidance.

I met Malcolm X once in Washington, but circumstances didn't enable me to talk with him for more than a minute. He is very articulate ... but I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views - at least insofar as I understand where he now stands.

In his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice. Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief.

We attempt to discover what is right by taking a sort of gallup poll of the majority opinion. Everybody is doing it, so it must be all right, and therefore we are caught in the clutches of conformity

What happens in Johannesburg affects Birmingham, however indirectly. We are descendants of the Africans. Our heritage is Africa. We should never seek to break the ties, nor should the Africans.

I'm getting sick and tired of people saying that this movement has been infiltrated by Communists. There are as many Communists in this freedom movement as there are Eskimos in Florida.

Why do white people seem to find it so difficult to understand that the Negro is sick and tired of having reluctantly parceled out to him those rights and privileges which all others receive upon birth or entry in America?

Everybody is busy, as I have said so often, trying to obey the eleventh commandment: "Thou shalt not get caught." And so, according to this view, it is all right to lie with a bit of finesse. It's all right to exploit, but be a dignified exploiter. It's all right to even hate, but dress your hate up into garments of love and make it appear that you are loving when you are actually hating.

In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man.

There is no separate black path to power and fulfillment that dies not intersect white paths, and there is no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity.

The language, the cultural patterns, the music, the material prosperity, and even the food of America are an amalgam of black and white.

I never cease to wonder at the amazing presumption of much of white society, assuming that they have the right to bargain with the Negro for his freedom. This continued arrogant ladling out of pieces of the rights of citizenship has begun to generate a fury in the Negro.

In every age and every generation men have dreamed of some promised land of fulfillment of freedom. Whether it was the right promised land or not, they dreamed of it.

What the Negro wants -- and will not stop until he gets -- is absolute and unqualified freedom and equality here in this land of his birth, and not in Africa or in some imaginary state.

A minister cannot preach the glories of heaven while ignoring social conditions in his own community that cause men an earthly hell. I stressed that the Negro minister had particular freedom and independence to provide strong, firm leadership, and I asked how the Negro would ever gain freedom without his minister's guidance, support and inspiration.

The Negro no longer will be tolerant of anything less than his due right and heritage. He is pursuing only that which he knows is honorably his. He knows that he is right.

For never in Christian history, within a Christian country, have Christian churches been on the receiving end of such naked brutality and violence as we are witnessing here in America today. Not since the days of the Christians in the catacombs has God's house, as a symbol, weathered such attack as the Negro churches.

Individuals will get bogged down in a particular mountain in a particular spot, and thereby become the victims of stagnant complacency. So, this afternoon, I would like to deal with three or four symbolic mountains that we have been in long enough-mountains that we must move out of if we are to go forward in our world and if civilization is to survive.

I shall never forget the grief and bitterness I felt on that terrible September morning when a bomb blew out the lives of those four little, innocent girls sitting in their Sunday-school class in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I think of how a woman cried out, crunching through broken glass, "My God, we're not even safe in church!"