Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

Unity has never meant uniformity.

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

The surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.

Even if they try to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that there are some things so precious, some things so eternally true that they are worth dying for. And if a person has not found something to die for, that person isn't fit to live!

God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. History has proven time and time again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive.He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love

The belief that God will do everything for man is as untenable as the belief that man can do everything for himself. It, too, is based on a lack of faith. We must learn that to expect God to do everything while we do nothing is not faith but superstition.

We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.

I am tired of seeing people battered and bruised and bloody, injured and jumped on, along the Jericho Roads of life.

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.