Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not 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 awaiting burial.

True sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.

The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others.

Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy five and yet not ever truly to have lived.

And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don't just set out to do a good job.

If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn't function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically.

I don't think you can be in public life without being called bad names.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' And Vanity comes along and asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But Conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?'

A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

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.

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.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

The time is always right to do what is right.

I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

The Curse of poverty has no justification in our age...The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It is always the right time to do the right thing.

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.

Jazz speaks for life. This is triumphant music.

Even though I have never had an abrupt conversion experience, religion has been real to me and closely knitted to life. In fact the two cannot be separated; religion for me is life.