Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

We have a great dream. It started way back in 1776, and God grant that America will be true to her dream.

Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.

My obligation is to do the right thing. The rest is in God's hands.

God made the world from nothing, and if we can be nothing, then God can make something of us.

The body is God's temple, but we are to worship God, not the temple.

I'm grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle.

I know that God is not going to willfully hurt us. Why there is suffering is the business of the Lord, but He never seems to give us more than we can bear.

We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights.

The SILENCE of the good people is more DANGEROUS than the BRUTALITY of the bad people

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.

I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once, the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared.

I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

Lord help me to see M. L. King as M. L. King in his true perspective.

History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change.

Freedom has always been an expensive thing. History is fit testimony to the fact that freedom is rarely gained without sacrifice and self-denial.

[W]e are the heirs of a past of rope, fire, and murder. I for one am not ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us.

It will be one of the tragedies of Christian history if future historians record that at the height of the twentieth century the church was one of the greatest bulwarks of white supremacy.

... the right to defend one's home and one's person when attacked has been guaranteed through the ages by common law.

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.