Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

As Martin Luther King said, "Passively to participate in an unjust system is to accept that system and to participate in its evil."

To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.

An institution or reform movement that is not selfish, must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness.

Through nonviolent resistance the Negro will be able to rise to the noble height of opposing the unjust system while loving the perpetrators of the system.

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

Some laws are wrong, and we have an obligation to speak out against those laws wherever they are.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

You don't fight injustice by asking to become part of the system that committed the injustice against you in the first place. That's like a freed slave striving to become a slave owner.

If we are not actively fighting against regressive ideologies, we are contributing to making them grow.

A time comes when silence is betrayal.

You either fight active evil or you accept it. Doing nothing is acceptance. There is no in-between.

Whenever there is injustice, oppression, aggression, violence, it's standard for it to be supported by those we now call "intellectuals," but typically not by all; there is typically a fringe of dissidents. With very rare exceptions - in fact, it's hard to think of any - they suffer in one or another way; how depends on the nature of the society.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

Between the government which does evil and the people who accept it - there is a certain shameful solidarity.

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.

A good person will resist an evil system with his whole soul. Disobedience of the laws of an evil state is therefore a duty.

Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil.

My uncertainty disappeared. Segregation is evil, and I cannot, as a minister, condone evil.

The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds every man that he is his brother's keeper.

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.

Wilberforce and the band of abolitionists knew that a private faith that did not act in the face of oppression was no faith at all.

If, while I hear the wild shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth, am I not guilty?

We all have a large stake in preserving our democracy, but I maintain that those without power in our society, the black, the brown, the poor of all colors, have the largest stake not because we have the most to lose, but because we have worked the hardest, and given the most, for what we have achieved.