Top 500 Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

402. “Your self-image should not come from the job you do but from how well you do your job.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

403. “The principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites-Acquiescence and violence -while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

404. “Nonviolence is the most potent technique for oppressed people. Unearned suffering is redemptive.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

405. “Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political moral questions of our time.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

406. “Cowardice asks the question, is it safe?”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

407. “We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

408. “Often the oppressor goes along unaware of the evil involved in his oppression so long as the oppressed accepts it.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

409. “Every man is somebody because he is a child of God.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

410. “We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers and sisters.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

411. “The words ‘I will forgive you, but I’ll never forget what you’ve done’ never explain the real nature of forgiveness.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

412. “Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

413. “In some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

414. “Without hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

415. “Resistance and nonviolence are not in themselves good. There is another element that must be present in our struggle that then makes our resistance and nonviolence truly meaningful. That element is reconciliation. Our ultimate end must be the creation of the beloved community.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

416. “There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

417. “Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

418. “The whole world must see that Israel must exist and has the right to exist, and is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

419. “You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by the iron feet of oppression.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

420. “I’m very glad Christ tells us to love our neighbor and not to like our neighbor because it’s hard to like someone threatening your children and throwing fire bombs through your window, but He asks us to love them and that I can do.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

421. “All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

422. “Violence is not the way.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

423. “The purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

424. “If your opponent has a conscience, then follow Gandhi and nonviolence. But if your enemy has no conscience like Hitler, then follow Bonhoeffer.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

425. “One of these days I’m going to put my body where my mind is.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

426. “Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

427. “For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions in the South, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire system, a revolution of values.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

428. “Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

429. “My mommy always said there were no monsters – no real ones – but there are.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

430. “So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

431. “My place is in the sunlight of opportunity.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

432. “Segregation is the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

433. “The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds every man that he is his brother’s keeper.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

434. “Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

435. “It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the ligitimate goals of his life.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

436. “As television beamed the image of this extraordinary gathering across the border oceans, everyone who believed in man’s capacity to better himself had a moment of inspiration and confidence in the future of the human race.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

437. “The reason I can’t follow the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy is that it ends up leaving everyone blind.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

438. “Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

439. “America, you must be born again!”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

440. “Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

441. “There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

442. “Right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

443. “We must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers .”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

444. “We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

445. “Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

446. “Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

447. “A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

448. “The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

449. “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.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

450. “Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? – “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.””

— Martin Luther King Jr.