Quotes By Martin Luther King Jr

Nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.

I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him.

In the long run of history, destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.

The guardians of the status quo are always on hand with their oxygen tents to keep the old order alive.

We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

We must condemn those who are perpetuating the violence and not the individuals who engage in the pursuit of their constitutional rights.

You must be willing to suffer the anger of the opponent and yet not return anger. No matter how emotional your opponents are, you must remain calm.

We cannot long survive spiritually separated in a world that is geographically together.

Nothing worthwhile is gained without sacrifice.

This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom.

Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse, and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.

So it means that we must rise up and protest courageously wherever we find segregation. Yes, we must do it nonviolently. We cannot afford to use violence in the struggle.

There is no such thing as separate but equal. Separation, segregation, inevitably makes for inequality.

Equality is not only a matter of quantity but of quality; not merely of mathematics and geometry, but of psychology.

If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work.

I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.

Our problem is not to be rid of fear but rather to harness and master it.