Quotes By Martin Luther King Jr

Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.

There are no broad highways to lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. We must keep going.

We must have the compassion and understanding for those who hate us.

Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent, but he also refuses to hate him.

All too many of those who live in affluent America ignore those who exist in poor America.

I think the inconveniences of a segregated education are much greater than the inconveniences of busing students so that they can get an integrated quality education.

I often feel like saying, when I hear the question 'People aren't ready,' that it's like telling a person who is trying to swim, 'Don't jump in that water until you learn how to swim.' When actually you will never learn how to swim until you get in the water. And I think people have to have an opportunity to develop themselves and govern themselves.

Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks. As they spread the propaganda of war, we must spread the propaganda of peace.

The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.

Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half of the world.

Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.

To other countries, I may go as a tourist, but to India, I come as a pilgrim.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

The principle of self defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi.