Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.
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.
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
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.
I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.
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.
Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.
That old law about 'an eye for an eye' leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.
Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
The principle of self defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Gandhi.
We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.
All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.