Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

I'm not going to sit around and be peace and love with somebody's boot on my neck.

The answer to injustice is not to silence the critic but to end the injustice.

For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.

Where I come from, if you see your family and friends' civil rights being taken away, you speak up and do everything you can to keep that from happening!

Probably I understand very much the people who rise against injustice.

Oppression costs the oppressor too much if the oppressed stand up and protest.

We will have demonstrations until the injustices that have caused them are eliminated.

I pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery.

When human statecraft attaches a chain to the feet of a free man, whom it makes a slave in contempt of nature and citizenship, eternal justice rivets the other end about the tyrant's neck.

America stands for freedom, liberty and justice for all. And it's not happening for all right now.

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.

Shall we longer bear these cruelties which have been heaped upon us for the last ten years in the face of heaven, and in open violation of the constitution and law of these United States and of this state? God forbid! I will not bear it. If they take away my rights, I will fight for them manfully and righteously until I am used up. We have done nothing against the rights of others.

Lost rights are never regained by appeals to the conscience of the usurpers, but by relentless struggle....goa ts are used for sacrificial offerings and not lions.

The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.

You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

We say no to the peace that keeps us on our knees, no to the peace that keeps us in chains, no to the false peace that denies the values and contributions of our peoples.

I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world.

Tremble, all ye oppressors of the world!

When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.

I have a big passion about civil rights for everyone - whoever is being downtrodden at the moment, it doesn't matter: racial discrimination or sexual orientation or gender. Whatever it is, I'm there. I think I was a born civil rights activist. I can't stand the smashing of a community. It's not fair and it's not right.

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

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.

All I did was ask for rights. I didn't attack anyone. I didn't harass anyone. I didn't oppose the system or the country or the authority. All I said is, 'Why can't I drive?'

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

Repression or oppression never yet succeeded in crushing the truth or redressing a wrong.