Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

I firmly believe that the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent resistance is the only logical and moral approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States.

Even after facing jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. courageously and boldly spoke out against racial inequality.

I don't favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I'm also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people.

I myself would go for nonviolence if it was consistent, if everybody was going to be nonviolent all the time. I'd say, okay, let's get with it, we'll all be nonviolent. But I don't go along with any kind of nonviolence unless everybody's going to be nonviolent. If they make the Ku Klux Klan nonviolent, I'll be nonviolent. If they make the White Citizens Council nonviolent, I'll be nonviolent. But as long as you've got somebody else not being nonviolent, I don't want anybody coming to me talking any nonviolent talk.

I think we brought to the world, the United States anyway, the whole idea of boycotting as a nonviolent tactic. I think we showed the world that nonviolence can work to make social change.

The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.

Nonviolence with Dr. [Martin Luther ]King is only a method. That's not his objective.

In the time when my mother began standing up against prejudice and racism, the vast majority of white Americans rarely thought about civil rights.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

My friends in the Congress, I have known Coretta King since I went south during the civil rights movement as a lawyer. She was a vibrant, consistent, totally dedicated partner with her husband.

The legal difference between the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders was significant.

Please tell the Attorney General that we have been cooling off for 350 years. If we cool off any more, we’ll be in the deep freeze. The Freedom Rides will go on.

Martin Luther King told American Blacks not to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

I want you to leave here with a sense of mission. Martin Luther King is waiting for you to march with him.

I think if people really read Martin Luther King, Jr., then they would begin to understand what he really represented.

I grew up reading Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

My grandfather James Peck was a civil rights activist.

I'm old enough to have lived through a time when Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and others died so people of color could vote.

In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.

My father joined the NAACP when he was 12, in the '50s. He was part of the organizing efforts that led to some of the first sit-ins in North Carolina.

Be nonviolent only with those who are nonviolent to you. And when you can bring me a nonviolent racist, bring me a nonviolent segregationist, then I'll get nonviolent. But don't teach me to be nonviolent until you teach some of those crackers to be nonviolent.

There is a more excellent way, of love and nonviolent protest.

I cannot make myself believe that God wanted me to hate. I'm tired of violence, I've seen too much of it. I've seen such hate on the faces of too many sheriffs in the South. And I'm not going to let my oppressor dictate to me what method I must use. Our oppressors have used violence. Our oppressors have used hatred. Our oppressors have used rifles and guns. I'm not going to stoop down to their level. I want to rise to a higher level. We have a power that can't be found in Molotov cocktails.

I was in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses in the '60s.

Nonviolent resistance makes it possible for the Negro to remain in the South and struggle for his rights. The Negro's problem will not be solved by running away.