Quotes By Martin Luther King Jr.

We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But... the good Samaritan reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.

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.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'

Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

The time is always right to do what is right.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.

A right delayed is a right denied.

I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

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.

Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

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 believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

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.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.