Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that

We will be greatly misled if we feel that the problem will work itself out. Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting. If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice.

The larger society was willing to let the frustrations born of racism's violence become internalized and consume its victims. America's horror was only expressed when the aggression turned outward, when the ghetto and its controls could no longer contain its destructiveness.

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.

God is neither Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian , nor Episcopalian [nor Reformed, either]. God transcends our denominations. If you are to be true witnesses for Christ, you must come to know this....

Rationalization and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our individual and collective sins. But the day has passed for bland euphemisms. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery.

He explains how all African Americans involved in our own liberation struggle came to embody the dignity of moral conviction and self-sacrifice. Importantly, he explains here how the way of nonviolence heals the oppressed as well as the oppressor.

we will make progress if we freely admit that we have no magic.

if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we … must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.

Yes we have learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we have not learned the simple art of walking the earth as brothers and sisters.

To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.

It is not enough for the church to be active in the realm of ideas; it must move out to the arena of social action.

Love yourself, if that means rational, healthy, and moral self-interest. You are commanded to do that. That is the length of life. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. You are commanded to do that. That is the breadth of life. But never forget that there is a first and even greater commandment, Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy mind. This is the height of life. And when you do this you live the complete life.

Why does misery constantly haunt the Negro?

Life's most urgent question is: What are you doing for others?

I suggested then that the prize was not given merely as recognition of past achievement, but also as recognition, a more profound recognition, that the nonviolent way, the American Negro's way, was the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.

The history books, which have almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, have only served to intensify the Negroes' sense of worthlessness and to augment the anachronistic doctrine of white supremacy.

The hardhearted individual never sees people as people, but rather as mere objects or as impersonal cogs in an ever-turning wheel. In the vast wheel of industry, he sees men as hands … He depersonalizes life.

The Negro knows he is right. he has not organized for conquest or to gain spoils or to enslave those who have injured him. His goal is not to capture that which belongs to someone else. He merely wants and will have what is honorably his.

The relatively privileged Negro will never be what he ought to be until the underprivileged Negro is what he ought to be. The salvation of the Negro middle class is ultimately dependent upon the salvation of the Negro masses.

Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create.

A religion that professes a concern for the souls of men and is not equally concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them , is a spiritually moribund religion

For too long the depth of racism in American life has been underestimated. The surgery to extract it is necessarily complex and detailed.

Certainly Birmingham had its white moderates who disapproved of Bull Connor's tactics. Certainly Birmingham had its decent white citizens who privately deplored the maltreatment of Negroes. But they remained publicly silent. It was a silence born of fear—fear of social, political and economic reprisals. The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.