Martin Luther King, Jr.
Quotations
"History will have to record
that the greatest tragedy of this period ... was not the strident
clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good
people.
***
The greatest purveyor of violence
on earth is my own government.
***
Every man of humane convictions
must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but
we must all protest.
***
Many people fear nothing more
terrible than to take a position which stands out sharply and
clearly from the prevailing opinion.
The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambigious that
it will include everything and so popular that it will include
everybody.
***
A nation that continues year after
year to spend more money on military defense than on programs
of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
***
Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
***
Human progress is neither automatic
nor inevitable ... Every step toward the goal of justice requires
sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and
passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
***
One may well ask: How can you
advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer lies
in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.
I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not
only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely,
one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
***
If an American is concerned only
about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of
Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage
in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence?
Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is
a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is
an act of heroic virtue?
***
We must use our vast resources
of wealth to aid the undeveloped countries of the world. We have
spent far too much of our national budget in establishing military
bases around the world and far too little in establishing bases
of genuine concern and understanding.
***
We in the West must bear in mind that the poor countries are poor
primarily because we have exploited them through political or
economic colonialism.
***
Law and order exist for the purpose
of establishing justice . . . when they fail in this purpose they
become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of
social progress.
***
" It is a sad fact that because
of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness
to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so
much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now
become the arch-anti-revolutionaries. "
***
It is not possible to be in favor
of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for
all people.
***
The most dangerous criminal may
be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.
***
Our scientific power has outrun
our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
***
We must rapidly begin the shift
from a "thing"-oriented society to a "person"-oriented
society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property
rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets
of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable to being conquered.
***
Success, recognition, and conformity
are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave
the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.
***
We are a nation that worships
the frontier tradition, and our heroes are those who champion
justice through violent retaliation against injustice. It is not
simple to adopt a credo that moral force has as much strength
and virtue as the capacity to return a physical blow; or that
to refrain from hitting back requires more will and bravery than
the automatic reflexes of defense.
***
The Darwinian concept of the survival
of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival
of the slickest.
***
Often the oppressor goes along
unaware of the evil involved in his oppression so long as the
oppressed accepts it.
***
Our loyalties must transend our race, our tribe, our class, and
our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.
***
I never intend to adjust myself
to the madness of militarism
***
Injustice anywhere is a threat
to justice everywhere.
***
No social advance rolls in on
the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts
and persistent work of dedicated individuals.
***
Every person must decide whether
to walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of
destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life's most persistent
and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'
***
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.
***
For years I labored with the idea
of reforming the existing institutions ... Now I feel quite differently.
I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society,
a revolution of values.
***
Capitalists of the West investing
huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to
take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment
of the countries.
***
"I submit that an individual
who breaks a 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 injustices is in reality expressing
the very highest respect for law."
(The "law" that King respected ... was not man-made
law. He meant respect for the higher law, the law of morality,
of justice.)
***
The peasants watched as we supported
a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself
with extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents.
The peasants watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned
their huts, annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into
the towns, where thousands of homeless children roamed the streets
like animals, begging for food and selling their mothers and sisters
to American soldiers. What do the peasants think as we test our
latest weapons on them, as the Germans tested new medicine and
tortures in Europe's concentration camps?
... We have destroyed their
land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionary political
force-the United Buddhist Church. We have corrupted their women
and children and killed their men. What liberators!
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