Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

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

With God as witness, I want to proclaim this truth, that the way of violence cannot bring Swaraj, it can only lead to disaster.

Every government on earth is the personification of violence and force, and yet the doctine of non-resistance is as old as human thought - even more than this, the instinct is as old as life upon the earth.

It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.

Non-violence ... is the only thing that the atom bomb cannot destroy. I did not move a muscle when I first heard that the atom bomb had wiped out Hiroshima. On the contrary, I said to myself, Unless now the world adopts non-violence, it will spell certain suicide for mankind.

Non-violence is a very powerful weapon. Most people don't understand the power of non-violence and tend to be amazed by the whole idea. Those who have been involved in bringing about change and see the difference between violence and non-violence are firmly committed to a lifetime of non-violence, not because it is easy or because it is cowardly, but because it is an effective and very powerful way.

Nonviolence becomes meaningless if violence is permitted for self-defence.

Our aim is not to do things by violence to opponents.

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

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

I knew A.J. Muste very well. I tried for a while to be like he was, and that is a total pacifist. But then Margot [my wife] hit me hard in the stomach one day to prove to me that I wasn't as perfect a pacifist as I thought I was.

I feel that non-violence is really the only way that we can follow because violence is just so self-defeating. A riot ends up creating many more problems for the negro community than it solved. We can through violence burn down a building, but you can't establish justice. You can murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder through violence. You can murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. And what we're trying to get rid of is hate, injustice, and all of these other things that continue the long night of man's inhumanity to man.

What does it mean when a person is such a pacifist that they get shot? I can never understand that.

The votaries of nonviolence cannot harbour violence even in thought, let alone the question of doing it.

Through Gandhi and my own life experience, I have learned about nonviolence. I believe that human life is a very special gift from God, and that no one has a right to take that away in any cause, however just. I am convinced that nonviolence is more powerful than violence.

Indeed the very word, nonviolence, a negative word, means that it is an effort to abandon the violence that is inevitable in life.

Non-violence has suffered its biggest defeat in the hands of people who most want to talk about it.

Leo Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of non­resistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in self­suffering.

If all were nonviolent, there would be no anarchy and there would be no question of anybody being armed for meeting aggression from without.

Nonviolence to be worth anything has to work in the face of hostile forces.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.

Nonviolence of the strong is infinitely braver than their violence.

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.

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