Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is such a thing as the freedom of exhaustion. Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up.... The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber.... To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.

It is historically and biologically true that there can be no birth and growth without birth and growing pains. Whenever there is the emergence of the new we confront the recalcitrance of the old. So the tensions which we witness in the world today are indicative of the fact that a new world order is being born and an old order is passing away.

You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, "There lived a great people - a black people - who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization." This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.

The Negro's great stumbling block is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice,… who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom.

The sooner our society admits that the Negro Revolution is no momentary outburst soon to subside into placid passivity, the easier the future will be for us all.

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.

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.

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you to go on in spite of all. And so today I still have a dream.

The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.

I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality

I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship.