Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind.

Every man is somebody because he is a child of God.

Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.

A strong man must be militant as well as moderate. He must be a realist as well as an idealist.

Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.

[E]very human life is a reflection of divinity, and... every act of injustice mars and defaces the image of God in man.

The strong man is the man who can stand up for his rights and not hit back.

We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly.

We must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.

I would rather be a man of conviction than a man of conformity

One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying.

In order to be true to one's conscience and true to God, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system.

Nothing degrades a man do more than the allowed stoop so low as to hate someone

Even in the inevitable moments when all seems hopeless, men know that without hope they cannot really live, and in agonizing desperation they cry for the bread of hope.

Our age is one of guided missiles and unguided men.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

Whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent

When the Negro was completely an underdog, he needed white spokesmen. Liberals played their parts in this period exceedingly well. In assault after assault, they led the intellectual revolt against racism, and took the initiative in founding the civil rights organizations. But now that the Negro has rejected his role as the underdog, he has become more assertive in his search for identity and group solidarity; he wants to speak for himself.