Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

If given a choice, I would have certainly selected to be what I am: one of the oppressed instead of one of the oppressors.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

Raise your eyes and count the small gang of your oppressors who are only strong through the blood they suck from you and through your arms which you lend them unwillingly.

I always remember I'm the monkey and he's the organ-grinder.

If you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.

All colonies are oppressed peoples.

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humilation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.

When one by force subdues men, they do not submit to him in heart. They submit because their strength is not adequate to resist.

The cry of the Have-Nots has never been "give us our hearts," but always "get off our backs"; they ask not for love but for breathing space.

Power not only corrupts he who wields the power but those who submit to it. Those who grovel at the feet of power betray their fellows to hide themselves behind the cloak of submission. It is an evil thing.

When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots. They can't get away with their abuse. They can't get away with subjection. They can't get away with subjugation. They can't get away with exploitation. They can't get away with domination. It takes courage for folk to stand up.

It's hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent. Everything in the universe does something when you start playing with his life, except the American Negro. He lays down and says, 'Beat me, daddy.'

The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.

You can be a control freak only when you have weak people around you.

Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance.

I think I've always had a certain amount of skepticism of this whole 'shut up and smile' theory. I haven't ever swallowed that pill so easily, although I tried.

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

If you turn the other cheek, you can be enslaved for 1,000 years.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

To be a slaveholder meant one had to regard the African American as inferior in every way.

The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.