Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

Civil disobedience is not only the natural right of a people, especially when they have no effective voice in their own Government, but that it is also a substitute for violence or armed rebellion.

If we had to kneel in order to live in peace, [ U.S. government] will have to kill us before.

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.

I think violence is counter-productive and it is bad in democratic societies.

Civil disobedience is a preparation for mute suffering.

The privilege of resisting or disobeying a particular law or order accrues only to him who gives willing and unswerving obedience to the laws laid down for him.

The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68

There's no reason to be non-violent. There's no challenge unless you are living for people.

It is dissent from government policies which defines the true Patriot

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

I believe that it is my right and responsibility as an American to question our government when our government is wrong. I'm not one of the immature patriots who say my country right or wrong because my country is wrong now, and my country-the policies of my country are responsible for killing tens of thousands of innocent people, and I won't stand by and let that happen anymore.

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders . . . . and millions have been killed because of this obedience . . . .

The point of nonviolence is to build a floor, a strong new floor, beneath which we can no longer sink. A platform which stands a few feet above napalm, torture, exploitation, poison gas, A and H bombs, the works. Give man a decent place to stand.

f the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth - certainly the machine will wear out... but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

If they are truly nonviolent, they must also realize that civil disobedience is an impossibility till the preliminary work of construction is done.

The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long. The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

We need to also act out, and anything that [Donald] Trump does, anything he's trying to do that we don't agree with or anything this country is doing in general that we don't agree with, we need to protest, we need to make our voices heard. And that has to go beyond Twitter - for me as well.

I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it.

Our war cries opened the deaf ears of the almighty government and its accomplices.

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

Better still - your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War.

The oppressed will make surer and faster progress if they eschew violence and depend, as they do mainly depend in their organizing and strike activities, on their solidarity, courage, capacity for suffering and sacrifice, and on non-cooperation where injustice becomes extreme

The foundation of our movement rests on complete non-violence, whereas violence is the final refuge of the Government. And as no energy can be created without resistance, our nonresistance to Government violence must bring the latter to a standstill.

If a thousand [citizens] were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war