MARTIN LUTHER KING, Jr.
An eloquent,Baptist minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) combined the Christian philosophy of love with Mahatma Gandhi's teachings of nonviolent protest to lead the American civil rights movement in the name of freedom and equality.

• "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
• "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
• "A man who won't die for something is not fit to live."
• "I have a dream that one day ... the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."
• "I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!"
• "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
• "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and consciencious stupidity."
• "In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law ... That would lead to anarchy. An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."
• "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhwre. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
• "One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society ... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam."
• "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."
• "Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours." Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967.
• "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate."
• "If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values -- that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control."
• "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
• "Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind the Marxists like to see--an opiate of the people."
• "Any individual who submitted willingly to injustice did not really deserve more justice."
• "True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."
• "We will take direct action against injustice without waiting for other agencies to act.
  We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices.
  We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully because our aim is to persuade.
  We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself.
  We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts.
  We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise, but we are ready to suffer, when necessary and even risk our lives to become witnesses to the truth as we see it."
• "If you are called to be a street sweeper, sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.'
• "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
• "Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
• "The time is always right to do what is right.
• "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
• "We know finite disappointment, but we know infinite hope.