Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

This may well be," I said, "the darkest hour just before dawn. We have moved all of these months with the daring faith that God was with us in our struggle. The many experiences of days gone by have vindicated that faith in a most unexpected manner. We must go out with the same faith, the same conviction. We must believe that a way will be made out of no way.

out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope

The darkest hour of our struggle had become the hour of victory. Disappointment, sorrow, and despair are born at midnight, but morning follows. I

Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create. What we find when we enter these mortal plains is existence; but existence is the raw material out of which all life must be created. A productive and happy life is not something that you find; it is something that you make. And so the ability of Negroes and whites to work together, to understand each other, will not be found ready-made; it must be created by the fact of contact.

In the final analysis, God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives. In the final analysis, God knows that his children are weak and they are frail. In the final analysis, what God requires is that your heart is right.

Be sure that the means you employ are as pure as the end you seek.

Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

If you sow the seeds of violence in your struggle, unborn generations will reap the whirlwind of social disintegration.

Only in the darkness you can see the stars

The end of life is not to be happy nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what may.

Deep in our history of struggle for freedom, Canada was the North star

It is pretty difficult to imagine a single person having, simultaneously, the characteristics of the serpent and the dove, but this is what Jesus expects. We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.