Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.

I am tired of seeing people battered and bruised and bloody, injured and jumped on, along the Jericho Roads of life.

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

The Cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go to in order to restore broken community.

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

Dark yesterday can be transformed into bright tomorrow.

Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That's the problem. "The Minister to the Valley," February 23, 1968

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.

You can't stop a bird from landing on your head. But you can keep it from building a nest.

They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderer.

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.

The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven.