An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
More Quotes from Martin Luther King Jr.
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.
I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the “oughtness” that forever confronts him.
Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children.
More on These Topics
Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.
As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.
Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?
Wherever there is injustice, war, discrimination against women, gays and the disadvantaged, I did my best to show up and exert moral persuasion.
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free society is not only basic to a university but to the entire nation.
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism… The one absolutely certain way of brining this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.
I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable Asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.
Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the world always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people flourished.
No matter how outrageous a lie may be, it will be accepted if stated loudly enough and often enough.
I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot. Men are no superior by reason of the accidents of race and color. The are superior who have the best heart—the best brain.
The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country.
You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.
Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man's mind.
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
