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Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.
We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
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.
Religion operates not only on the vertical plane but also on the horizontal. It seeks not only to integrate men with God but to integrate men with men and each man with himself.
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.
A lie cannot live.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail.
There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.
I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.
It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.