Martin Luther King Jr. Biography | Inspiration Quotations

Martin Luther King Jr. Motivational Quotations:

• “Lightning makes no sound until it strikes.”

•  “We are not makers of history. We are made by history.”

•  “Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals.”

•  “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. ”

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

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

•  “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.”

•  “Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.”

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

• “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

•  “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”

•  “Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.”

•  “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. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

•  “There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.”

•  “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

•  “A lie cannot live.” “The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.”

• “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.”

•  “The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows”

•  “He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.”

•  “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.”

•  “There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.”

•  “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

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

•  “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. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”

•  “Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

•  “Nonviolence is absolute commitment to the way of love. Love is not emotional bash; it is not empty sentimentalism. It is the active outpouring of one’s whole being into the being of another.”

•  “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.”

•  “It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.”

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

•  “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”

•  “Everybody can be great … because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

•  “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.”

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

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

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

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

•  “Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.”

•  “Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.”

•  “You will change your mind; You will change your looks; You will change your smile, laugh, and ways but no matter what you change, you will always be you.”

•  “No person has the right to rain on your dreams.”

  

•  “Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”

•  “Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better. ”

•  “The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.”

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

•  “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”

•  “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

•  “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.”

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

•  “Never, never be afraid to do what’s right,  especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”

•  “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

•  “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?'”

•  “Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a constant attitude.”

•  “When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.”

•  “Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.”

•  “We cannot walk alone.”

•  “That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.”

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

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

• “We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.”

• “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

• “Not everybody can be famous but everybody can be great because greatness is determined by service… You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love.”

• “I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.”

• “Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.”

• “The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.”

•  “I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.”

•  “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

•  “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.”

•  “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”

•  “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… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

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

•  “Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.”

•  “We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

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

•  “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.”

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

•  “Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.”

•  “I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.”

•  “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.”

•  “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.”

•  “What is wrong in the world today is that the nations of the world are engaged in a bitter, colossal contest for supremacy.”

•  “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

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

•  “The more there are riots, the more repressive action will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing takeover and eventually a fascist society.”

•  “A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.”