Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

The law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.

We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.

Abolish lynching

This is not a question of expediency, but of right. In antebellum days the proposition was not, “Are the blacks good enough to be free?” but, “Have they the right?” So today the question is not, “Will outrages result from freeing humanity?” but, “Has it the right to life, the means of life, the opportunities of happiness?”

Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses...

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.

I could not comprehend the justice of that law, or that religion, which upholds or recognizes the principle of slavery.

For all the injustices in our past and our present, we have to believe that in the free exchange of ideas, justice will prevail over injustice, tolerance over intolerance and progress over reaction.

For as long as I can remember, I've always been interested in issues of social justice, political freedom, and civil rights.

There are those who say to you we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years too late.

America is a dirty rag if it will not protect all of its citizens.

Every type of discrimination whether social or cultural, whether based on sex, race, social condition, language or religion, is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God's intent.

We are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Is Justice to be established by subjecting half of mankind to the will of the other half? Justice, Sir, is blind to colors, and weighs in equal scales the rights of all men whether white or black…. An opportunity is now presented, if not to diminish, at least to prevent the growth of a sin that sits heavy on the soul of every one of us.

I cannot sit by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Religious liberty was never intended to give one religion dominion over other religions, or a veto power over the civil rights and civil liberties of others. However, today, as in the past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality. In our nation’s past religion has been used to justify slavery and later, Jim Crow laws. We now see “religious liberty” arguments sneaking their way back into our political and constitutional discourse (just like the concept of “state rights”) in an effort to undermine the rights of some Americans.

I fight against racism and bigotry because I care about the people who are experiencing it.

Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a "sacred right of self-government." These principles can not stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other.

The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic but to end the injustice.

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.

In the end anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: anti-humanism.

We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable.

We need to realize that we should be on the side of any human being who is oppressed.