Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

Nonviolent action, born of the awareness of suffering and nurtured by love, is the most effective way to confront adversity.

The power of unarmed nonviolence is any day far superior to that of armed force.

But nonviolence was never for the oppressor; it was for the oppressed.

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.

The power of nonviolent resistance can only come from honest working of the constructive programme.

It will be hard to find a parallel in history in which unarmed people have represented the urge for freedom, turning their armlessness into the central means for deliverance.

[People] don't see that there's a great deal of a difference between nonresistance to evil and nonviolent resistance.

The law of violence is not a law, but a simple fact which can only be a law when it does not meet with protest and opposition. It is like the cold, darkness and weight, which people had to put up with until recently when warmth, illumination and leverage were discovered.

Nonviolence, when it becomes active, travels with extraordinary velocity, and then it becomes a miracle.

Whatever strength the masses have is due entirely to ahimsa, however imperfect or defective its practice might have been.

Violence is the weapon of the weak.

However much I may sympathise with and admire worthy motives, I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes.

For satyagraha and its offshoots, non-co-operation and civil resistance, are nothing but new names for the law of suffering.

I myself am a very, very peaceful person. Throughout our history, from our own American revolution to the resistance against apartheid in South Africa, to labor strikes in the US, people have resorted to violence to achieve a more progressive society, from time to time.

The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.

Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement, not replace, the progress of change. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force.

An awakened people who rely upon their nonviolent strength are independent in the face of any conceivable combination of the armed powers.

Nonviolence, applied to very large masses of mankind, is a new experiment in the history of the world.

Our nonviolence vis-а-vis the British Government has been the nonviolence of the weak.

Non violence means people in action. People have to understand that with non-violence goes a hell of a lot of organization.

Civil disobedience does not admit of any violence or countenancing of violence directly or indirectly.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

The force generated by nonviolence is infinitely greater than the force of all the arms created by man's ingenuity.

It is claimed for satyagraha that it is a complete substitute for violence or war.

We're not really pacifists, we're nonviolent soldiers.