Martin Luther King Day

Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person. – Mother Teresa

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it. – Albert Einstein

When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders. – Veterans Fast for Life

If… the machine of government… is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. – Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobediance, 1849

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. – Bishop Desmond Tutu

A fifth point concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, 1958

I would be the last to condemn the thousands of sincere and dedicated people outside the churches who have labored unselfishly through various humanitarian movements to cure the world of social evils, for I would rather a man be a committed humanist than an uncommitted Christian. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued that self-defeating path of hate. Love is the key to the solution of the problems of the world. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Nobel Prize lecture, 11 December 1968

Will we march only to the music of time, or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soul-saving music of eternity? – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

When Negroes looked for the second phase, the realization of equality, they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared…. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967

Black Power alone is no more insurance against social injustice than white power. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967

In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967

I still have a dream today that one day war will come to an end, that men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, that nations will no longer rise up against nations, neither will they study war any more. – Martin Luther King,Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1968

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. – Martin Luther King,Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1968

As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, 1958

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. – Martin Luther King,Jr.

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. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and Earth will pause to say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well. – Martin Luther King,Jr.

I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship. – Martin Luther King,Jr.

[E]very human life is a reflection of divinity, and… every act of injustice mars and defaces the image of God in man. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967