Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

If we are going to achieve a real equality, the U.S. will have to adopt a modified form of Socialism.

I think that we must face the fact that in reality, you cannot have economic and political equality without having some form of social equality. I think this is inevitable.

I have a dream, one dream, keep dreaming. Dream of freedom, justice dreaming, dreaming of equality and hopefully no longer required to dream them

We all came in on different ships, but we're all in the same boat now

If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way

It is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.

We must move forward in the days ahead with audacious faith. The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.

The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.

Courage faces fear and thereby masters it. Cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it.

Our problem is not to be rid of fear but rather to harness and master it.

Your life begins to end the moment you start being silent about the things that matter.

No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.

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

Life's most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others? Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.

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

The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

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.

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.

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

Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.

There is some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us.

If we do an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we will be a blind and toothless nation.