Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

We are God's creation, and we have a responsibility to keep ourselves at our best.

We're all flawed human beings trying to be better but there's consequences to your actions and you have to be accountable for 'em.

The ability of a person to atone has always been the most remarkable of human features.

If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have, the more we grow.

Man's nature is fundamentally good, or perhaps it is neither good nor evil. In any case, man is something to work on. We must hold fast to this fact - man is something to work on.

I think guilt is directional. You should get rid of it, but the way to get rid of it is not to get rid of the guilt feelings. It is to get rid of the wrong that you did that caused the guilt feelings.

I've always felt like we're all human beings and we're all basically given the tools to make whatever choices we want to make. How we treat other people. How we treat ourselves. Just the whole philosophy of that and the philosophical logic of that is that we're all capable of great acts of evil, and we're all capable of great acts of good.

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.

Consider your origin; you were not born to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

…the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood seems to me, of all the philosophical theories, the most attuned to the needs of men in our time, and I see in it the most powerful safeguard men have left against themselves.

I think the single most important, fascinating, and complex aspect of human nature is that we all know, deep down, that we are not what we ought to be - or as John Doe says in 'Seven,' 'We are not what was intended.'

Man is man so long as he is struggling to rise above nature, and this nature is both internal and external.

Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people.

Every time we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act, we become a party to injustice.

The price of freedom is responsibility, but it's a bargain, because freedom is priceless.

Duty, then is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more; you should never wish to do less.

We are each of us responsible for the evil we may have prevented.

I declare my belief that it is not your duty to do anything that is not to your own interest. Whenever it is unquestionably your duty to do a thing, then it will benefit you to perform that duty.

The Buddhas do but tell the way; it is for you to swelter at the task.

Happiness is a moral obligation

It is his capacity for self-improvement and self-redemption which most distinguishes man from the mere brute.

Nobody has any right to find life uninteresting or unrewarding who sees within the sphere of his own activity a wrong he can help to remedy, or within himself an evil he can hope to overcome.

Every man has a commission to admonish, exhort, convince another of error.