Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

And Justice for Some

Justice is not available to all equally; it is something that many of us must struggle to achieve.

Sometimes great injustices may be inflicted on the minority when the majority is in the pursuit of a great and just cause.

When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses.

Social injustice is such a familiar phenomenon ... that it is readily regarded as something natural, even by its victims.

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

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Liberty without equality is a name of noble sound and squalid result.

Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

Privilege is the greatest enemy of right.

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

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

In every human society, there is an effort continually tending to confer on one part the height of power and happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and misery. The intent of good laws is to oppose this effort and to diffuse their influence universally and equally.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

There is no justice in social justice, and there is no equality in social equality.

Only very slowly and late have men come to realize that unless freedom is universal it is only extended privilege.

Well you know, all law is about injustice.

Segregation is that which is forced upon an inferior by a superior. Separation is done voluntarily by two equals.

American society will never completely understand the true meaning of equality.

Inequality of any kind, once considered a normal, natural part of human existence, came to be seen in the course of the twentieth century as increasingly illegitimate.

One Law for the Lion and the Ox is oppression.

Laws are only words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool.

Minorities…are almost always in the right.