Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

If you have not discovered something you are willing to die for, then you are not fit to live.

Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.

If a man is called to be a street sweeper. He should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted , or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all hosts of heaven and earth pause to say; Here lives a great sweeper who did his job well .

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and think critically. Intelligence plus character; that is the goal of a true education.

I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself.

Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.

noncooperation with evil is just as much a moral duty as is cooperation with good.

Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.

God is able to give you the power to endure that which cannot be changed... Why be anxious? Come what may, God is able.

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michealangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare composed poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, "Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven.