Quotes from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Brilliant thoughts from 

a Prophet for Our and All Times

Quotes from 

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. ”

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

“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

“Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

“The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows”

“He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.”

“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

“Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”

“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

“Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.”

“Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a constant attitude.”

“Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.”

“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

 “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

“We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”

“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

“A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.”

“No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

“The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.”

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.”

“At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.”

“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace.”

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”

“Mankind must put and end to war or war will put an end to mankind.”

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.”

“By opening our lives to God in Christ, we become new creatures. This experience, which Jesus spoke of as the new birth, is essential if we are to be transformed nonconformists … Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.”

“Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.”

“The God whom we worship is not a weak and incompetent God. He is able to beat back gigantic waves of opposition and to bring low prodigious mountains of evil. The ringing testimony of the Christian faith is that God is able.”

“The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’

King Had a Dream. Do we?

Freedom and Economic Justice: Rev. Martin Luther King's Unfinished Agenda

Richard G. Malloy, S.J., Ph.D.

In October of 1967, Rev. Martin Luther King spoke at St. Joe's in Philadelphia. In that speech, given just six months before he was assassinated, King stated, "Our goal is freedom. And I still have faith that we are going to get to that goal." The freedom King was speaking of that day was not simply racial equality. He was also speaking about economic justice. In his address, King spoke of the relative ease with which lunch counters had been desegregated, while he noted that it was proving much more difficult to eradicate the ghettos of the large Northern cities.

Earlier that year (August 1967) at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, his home church, King delivered a sermon entitled "Where Do We Go from Here?," in which he directly articulates many of the themes of economic justice he would touch upon later in October in his talk. King argued:

"When the constitution was written, a strange formula … declared that the Negro was sixty percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare that he is fifty percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. …half the income… twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population."

Note in the above quote, Rev. King putting to good use the methods of analyzing society he learned as an undergraduate Sociology major! What he was talking about near the end of his life was the simple truth that freedom and economic opportunity and equality were more than linked. You cannot have one without the other. Freedom and economic equality mutually condition one another.

Today, almost fifty years since the iconic "I Have a Dream Speech", some progress has been made, but there is still a long way to go. The median net worth of whites is ten times greater than that of African Americans.

Source: Prof. G. William Domhoff’s websitee. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html (accessed Jan 16, 2012)

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that median household income in the USA is $49,445. Median household income of whites ($54,620) is almost one third greater than that of Blacks ($32,068). And despite sincere efforts on so many levels, overt, vile racism is still evident in our society. Go to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website ( http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map) and see the virulent racism that still exists among us.

What would have happened if King's ideas were heeded? In his 1967 Atlanta speech, Rev. King called for the eradication of poverty in our midst. He proposed a Guaranteed National Income, an idea articulated at that time by John Kenneth Gailbraith and even championed by Richard Nixon a few years later. In 1967, it would have cost $20 billion for a Guaranteed National Income, about what we spent to put a man on the moon, and $15 billion less than the $35 billion we were wasting on the War in Vietnam. What would our country and the world look like today if poverty has been systematically eradicated thirty-five years ago?

In Martin Luther King, Jr., God sent us a prophet. The prophet spoke in our midst. And we have not yet heeded his message. The shortest verse in the Gospels is "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). There, Jesus is crying over the death of his friend Lazarus. I wonder what Jesus' reaction is to our society's inability/refusal to enflesh in law the principles of freedom and economic Justice, the principles for which Martin Luther King died at the young age of 39 years? Is Jesus weeping again? Maybe. Or maybe Jesus is calling us to Keep the Dream Alive, and bring to fruition the Dream of Rev. King. On that hot sweltering day in August 1963, King spoke of hope and healing, justice and joy.

“In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note…. But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice” (MLK, “I Have a Dream” Speech, 1963)

King had a dream. Do we?