Martin Luther King Day

Liberalism provided me with an intellectual satisfaction that I never found in fundamentalism. I became so enamored of the insights of liberalism that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything it encompassed. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

A second basic fact that characterizes nonviolence is that it does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, 1958

We need not join the mad rush to purchase an earthly fallout shelter. God is our eternal fallout shelter. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

The Christian faith makes it possible for us nobly to accept that which cannot be changed, and to meet disappointments and sorrow with an inner poise, and to absorb the most intense pain without abandoning our sense of hope. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

“I” cannot reach fulfillment without “thou.” The self cannot be self without other selves. Self-concern without other-concern is like a tributary that has no outward flow to the ocean. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967

The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Nobel Prize lecture, 11 December 1968

Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated slums. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967

But while so many white Americans are unaware of conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside. The television sets bombard them day by day with the opulence of the larger society. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967

The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967

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

Millions of citizens are deeply disturbed that the military-industrial complex too often shapes national policy, but they do not want to be considered unpatriotic. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

Let us say boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. – Martin Luther King,Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1968

There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminates even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

A world war – God forbid! – will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to untimely death. Yet there are those who sincerely feel that disarmament is an evil and international negotiation is an abominable waste of time. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

But alas! Science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967

Perhaps only his sense of humor and irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation in the world speaking of his aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation more than eight thousand miles away from its shores. – Martin Luther King,Jr., about Ho Chi Minh, Beyond Vietnam lecture, 4 April 1968

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-antirevolutionaries. – Martin Luther King,Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1968

Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face. But I left with a smile. I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime. – Martin Luther King,Jr., March 22, 1956