Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

When people are voiceless, they will have temper tantrums like a child who has not been paid attention to. And riots are massive temper tantrums from a neglected and voiceless people.

Violence brings only temporary victories; violence, by creating more social problems than it solves, never brings permanent peace. I am convinced that if we succumb to the temptation to use violence in our struggle for freedom, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to them will be a never-ending reign of chaos.

Unless you have found something in life to live for that is more important to you than your own life, you will always be a slave. For all another man needs to do is threaten to take your life to get you to do his bidding.

When I took up the cross I recognized it's meaning. The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately, that you die on.

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.

the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood.

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

Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.

Anyone leading a violent rebellion must be prepared to make an honest assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that would delight in exterminating thousands of black men, women and children.

We ain't what we oughta be. We ain't what we want to be. We ain't what we gonna be. But, thank God, we ain't what we was.

Actually, 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. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

This Revolution is genuine because it was born from the same womb that always gives birth to massive social upheavals - the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations.

If you have not discovered something you are willing to die for, then you are not fit to live.

Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.

The poor never get the job done they are sleepy.

If a man is called to be a street sweeper. He should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted , or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all hosts of heaven and earth pause to say; Here lives a great sweeper who did his job well .

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

and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky...

I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself.

Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.

noncooperation with evil is just as much a moral duty as is cooperation with good.

Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.

God is able to give you the power to endure that which cannot be changed... Why be anxious? Come what may, God is able.