Martin Luther King Quotes – Inspiring words of a Civil Rights icon

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

The time is always right to do what is right.

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.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

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.

The time is always ripe to do right.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.

We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Martin Luther King Quotes – Inspiring words of a Civil Rights icon part 2

True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.

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.

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

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

The time is always right to do what is right.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.

Courage is an inner resolution to go forward despite obstacles; cowardice is submissive surrender to circumstances.

If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.

We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.

Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.

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.

We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but on the positive affirmation of peace.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new.

We must learn to live together as brothers, or perish together as fools.

There comes a time when silence is betrayal.

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

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity.

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.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.

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.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.