Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

For years now I have heard the word “Wait”. It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never”.

Racism oppresses its victims, but also binds the oppressors, who sear their consciences with more and more lies until they become prisoners of those lies. They cannot face the truth of human equality because it reveals the horror of the injustices they commit.

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

Let me tell you this—and you may rely upon it, my dear friend—we will never again see the day when under British rule different degrees of rights and privileges will exist for different classes of His Majesty’s subjects.

If he presents himself to vote, he runs a risk to his life. Oppressed, he can complain, but if he finds only whites among his judges… His son is excluded from the school where the descendants of Europeans come to be instructed. In theaters he cannot buy for the price of gold the right to be placed at the side of one who was his master; in hospitals he lies apart. The black is permitted to beseech the same God as whites, but not to pray to him at the same alter.

Millions of Americans, too, face the intolerable fact that because of their race or their color or the way they choose to worship God, they are denied rights which are their birthrights and which, by American principle and law, are their just due.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

What then to the American black Slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him ... constant injustice.

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America

Segregation results inevitably in discrimination and inferior treatment

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

The writers of the Declaration of Independence were mistaken when they affirmed that all men are created equal. My slaves did not choose their lot in life, neither did we ask for ours; we are created for these places.

Slavery was gone but its inequalities remained.

You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.

The success of the few does not excuse the caste-like system that exists for many. In fact, black exceptionalism - the high-profile, highly visible examples of the black success - actually serves to justify and rationalize mass incarceration.

People have almost been lulled into complacency because there are no signs over the water fountains. But the signs have been in the policies. There's still housing discrimination and wage discrimination.

We can't continue to sit on our hands and sit idly by as people are being brutalized, disenfranchised, and left out of the system.

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

All our best men are laughed at in this nightmare land.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

Ageism is as odious as racism and sexism.

Sometimes, I can myself be frustrated by books that seem to me to be insufficiently realistic about the world's potential for just being totally a randomly bad place.