Quotes from Martin Luther King

Quotes from Martin Luther King
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
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.
We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.
Strength to Love, 1963.

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten....America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness--justice.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967.
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. Wall Street Journal, November 13, 1962.
Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement, not replace, the progress of change. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force. Why We Can't Wait, 1964.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967.
When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also declare that the white man does not abide by law in the ghettos. Day in and day out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions of civil services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them, but they do not make them, any more than a prisoner makes a prison.The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. Jr., Strength To Love, 1963.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?1967.