Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being.

I fear … that morals do not of necessity advance hand in hand with the sciences.

Fortunately, in her kindness and patience, Nature has never put the fatal question as to the meaning of their lives into the mouths of most people. And where no one asks, no one needs to answer.

In vulgar usage, progress has come to mean limitless movement in space and time, accompanied, necessarily, by an equally limitless command of energy: culminating in limitless destruction.

As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques.

it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.

This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of oppression.

Modern man-whether in the womb of the masses, or with his workmates, or with his family, or alone-can never for one moment forget that he is living in a world in which he is a means and whose end is not his business.

Man cannot live without some knowledge of the purpose of life. If he can find no purpose in life he creates one in the inevitability of death.

Not every advance is progress. Not every new thing is better for us humanly.

Thou madest man, he knows not why, he thinks he was not made to die.

Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.

We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain.

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.

To die is nothing. One is here, one is no longer here. It is only at the end one must be able to say 'I was a man'.

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.

If you just take it down to bare facts, the reason for living is the reason you make it. I mean the brain was made to create.

To me life means the growing of a soul. I do not know why this duty is imposed upon us. I merely know that it is, and I feel that we are given much latitude of free will.

Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.

Music is only a means to an end - it is not the end. The concern is with the condition of man

What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

If we live by subhuman means we might as well never have had the good fortune to be born human.