Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
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.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

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

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.

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.

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

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.

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

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

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.

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

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.

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?”

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.

The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.

The time is always right to do what is right.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

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

We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the positive affirmation of peace.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

We must use time creatively.

We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

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.

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.