Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, "There lived a great people - a black people - who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization." This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.

The Negro's great stumbling block is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice,… who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom.

The sooner our society admits that the Negro Revolution is no momentary outburst soon to subside into placid passivity, the easier the future will be for us all.

Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you to go on in spite of all. And so today I still have a dream.

The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.

I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality

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.

We need not join the mad rush to purchase an earthly fallout shelter. God is our eternal fallout shelter.

We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the very opposite of the democratic creed.... This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.

When the Negro was completely an underdog, he needed white spokesmen. Liberals played their parts in this period exceedingly well.... But now that the Negro has rejected his role as an underdog, he has become more assertive in his search for identity and group solidarity; he wants to speak for himself.