Top 500 Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Our problem is not to be rid of fear but rather to harness and master it.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

452. “Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

453. “It is Love that will save our world and our civilization.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

454. “The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

455. “Our world hinges on moral foundations. God has made it so. God has made the universe to be based on a moral law. So long as man disobeys it he is revolting against God. That’s what we need in the world today: people who will stand for right and goodness.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

456. “People are often led to causes and often become committed to great ideas through persons who personify those ideas. They have to find the embodiment of the idea in flesh and blood in order to commit themselves to it.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

457. “This faith transforms the whirlwind of despair into a warm and reviving breeze of hope. The words of a motto which a generation ago were commonly found on the wall in the homes of devout persons need to be etched on our hearts: Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. There was no one there.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

458. “One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

459. “Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? – “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.””

— Martin Luther King Jr.

460. “America must begin the struggle for democracy at home. The advocacy of free elections in Europe by American officials is hypocrisy when free elections are not held in great sections of America.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

461. “Whatever my doubts, however heavy the burden, I feel that I must accept the task of helping to make this nation and this world a better place to live in – for all men, black and white alike.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

462. “Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy five and yet not ever truly to have lived.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

463. “We were not unmindful of the difficulties involved. So we decided to go through a process of self-purification.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

464. “Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

465. “We must pursue peaceful end through peaceful means.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

466. “Racial understanding is not something we find, but something that we must create. Through education, we seek to change attitudes.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

467. “The ability to lead a happy life is made, not found.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

468. “In this world is a God whose matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

469. “We aren’t engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

470. “A second basic fact that characterizes nonviolence is that it does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

471. “When I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well, for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

472. “Let us say boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

473. “Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

474. “Christianity affirms that at the heart of reality is a Heart, a loving Father who works through history for the salvation of His children. Man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of all things and humanity is not God. Bound by the chains of his own sin and finiteness, man needs a Savior.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

475. “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

476. “Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

477. “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

478. “The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

479. “It is quite easy for me to think of a God of love mainly because I grew up in a family where love was central and where lovely relationships were ever present.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

480. “Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

481. “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

482. “The potential beauty of human life is constantly made ugly by man’s ever-recurring song of retaliation.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

483. “I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

484. “I still have a dream today that one day war will come to an end, that men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, that nations will no longer rise up against nations, neither will they study war any more.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

485. “Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

486. “Our generation will not have regretted both perverse crimes, and the eerie silence of the kind.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

487. “Like a boil that must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed to the light of human conscience before it can be cured.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

488. “What good does it do to sit at the counter when you cannot afford a hamburger?”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

489. “Make your way to death row and speak with the tragic victims of criminality. As they prepare to make their pathetic walk to the electric chair, their hopeless cry is that society will not forgive. Capital punishment is society’s final assertion that it will not forgive.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

490. “When I took up the cross I recognized it’s meaning. The cross is something that you bear, and ultimately, that you die on.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

491. “Good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

492. “The self cannot be self without other selves.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

493. “Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

494. “As the weeks and months unfolded, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

495. “I would suffer all the humiliation, all the torture, the absolute ostracism and even death, to prevent violence.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

496. “Even in the inevitable moments when all seems hopeless, men know that without hope they cannot really live, and in agonizing desperation they cry for the bread of hope.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

497. “There is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

498. “Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

499. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the hopes of men the world over.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

500. “We must have our freedom now. We must have the right to vote. We must have equal protection of the law.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.