Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.

This is how a revolution begins. It begins when someone grows tired of standing idly by, waiting for history's arc to bend toward justice, and instead decides to give it a swift shove. It begins when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in the segregated South.

If something's not right, then you have to take to the streets and make it right.

I don't want tea, I want justice!

We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an amazing patience... But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.

When you say I want to talk about racial justice, that's not the same as saying I want to do something about racial justice.

At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.

Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. Rise up while you can.

I will fight to defend liberty.

Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.

The bottom line is, if you stay home, your message stays home with you. If you stand for justice and equality, you have an obligation to find the biggest possible megaphone to let your feelings be known. Don't let your message be buried and don't bury yourself.

A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time.

So keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds.

Charity is only a waystation on the road to justice.

Sometimes you must live in a violent world in order to get greater justice.

Lost rights are never regained by appeals to the conscience of the usurpers, but by relentless struggle....goa ts are used for sacrificial offerings and not lions.

My job is to steel the backbone of people on the frontlines of social justice struggles, and to put wind in sails of those struggles. And people who are fighting on a, on a daily basis, at a grass roots level.

What's more important is that we talk about movements; change happens through movements. The movement to end slavery, the movement to bring justice for those who have been left out of the system, movements to include women, movements around sexual preference - all these movements brought about change.

When wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality.

There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it's worth putting up a fight.

Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil.

All over this world people are standing up for freedom.

Every man or woman who makes a stand helps keep the flame of freedom burning.

If in my lifetime the problem of non-free software is solved, I could perhaps relax and write software again. But I might instead try to help deal with the world's larger problems. Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating, and now I have a taste for it.