91 Powerful Quotes of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
Martin Luther King, Jr.s also known as American activist, worked for peace, equality, love and justice among the people. All of these things apart him from other activists. He was the backbone of civil rights movements and always spread peace and love. Due to this he is a renowned person in American history.
Martin Luther King, Jr.s birthday was January 15, and celebrated every year with a holiday in America on third Monday of January.
Despite his assassination on April 4, 1968 his quotes and speeches are still widely used to spread love, peace, justice and civil rights.
Here are 91 quotes of Martin Luther King, Jr.s on different topics; justice, education, freedom, leadership & quality, faith, nonviolence, progress, inspirational, and life.
Let’s explore all the powerful quotes of Martin Luther King, Jr.s
Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes on Justice
1. “A right delayed is a right denied.”
2. “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.”
3. “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
4. “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but I can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”
5. “The time is always right to do what is right.”
6. “It is not possible to be in favor of justice for some people and not be in favor of justice for all people.”
7. “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
8. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes on Education and Freedom
9. “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.”
10. “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
11. “Your ignorance is their power.”
12. “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”
13. “Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”
14. “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.”
15. “Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.”
16. “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the pressure; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes on Leadership & Equality
17. “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”
18. “Never, never be afraid to do what’s right. Especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the ones we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”
19. “I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.”
20. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
21. “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”
22. “Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.”
23. “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”
24. “Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.”
25. “But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.”
26. “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”
27. “We must learn to live together as brothers, or perish together as fools.”
28. “Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes on Faith
29. “If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.”
30. “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
31. “Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals.”
32. “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.”
33. “We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.”
34. “Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”
35. “We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope.”
36. “We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.”
37. “Use me, God. Show me how to take who I am, who I want to be, and what I can do, and use it for a purpose greater than myself.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes on Nonviolence
38. “At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.”
39. “The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. That’s all.”
40. “Violence brings only temporary victories; violence, by creating many more social problems than it solves, never brings permanent peace.”
41. “The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.”
42. “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”
43. “Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but as a means by which we arrive at that goal.”
44. “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”
45. “It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.”
46. “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
47. “We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the positive affirmation of peace.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes on Progress
48. “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.”
49. “We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.”
50. “We are not makers of history. We are made by history.”
51. “The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”
52. Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but it comes through continuous struggle.
Inspirational Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes
53. “You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.”
54. “So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”
55. “The difference between a dreamer and a visionary is that a dreamer has his eyes closed and a visionary has his eyes open.”
56. “Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”
57. “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
58. “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”
59. “One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right when the head is totally wrong.”
60. “People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they have not communicated with each other.”
61. “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”
62. “But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”
63. “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, he lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
64. “Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a constant attitude.”
65. “Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.”
66. “When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong you cannot be too conservative.”
67. “I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream.”
68. “If I cannot do great things I can do small things in a great way.”
69. “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
70. “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.”
71. “Lightning makes no sound until it strikes.”
72. “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”
73. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
74. “No person has the right to rain on your dreams.”
75. “Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”
76. “A lie cannot live.”
77. “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy.”
78. “Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes on Life
79. “Live like Jesus died yesterday, rose this morning, and is coming back tomorrow.”
80. “It does not matter how long you live, but how well you do it.”
81. “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?”
82. “Everybody can be great … because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
83. “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.”
84. “To be great, you have to be willing to be mocked, hated, and misunderstood. Stay strong.”
85. “You will change your mind; You will change your looks; You will change your smile, laugh, and ways but no matter what you change, you will always be you.”
86. “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.”
87. “No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.”
88. “There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.”
89. “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.”
90. “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
91. “The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.”
