22 Powerful and Inspiring Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

The time comes when silence is betrayal.

Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.

A riot is the language of the unheard.

Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right.

I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

The arch of History is long, but it bends towards justice.

As I like to say to the people in Montgomery: "The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness."

Courage faces fear and thereby masters it.

The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.

Only in the darkness can you see the stars.

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, "There lived a great people - a black people - who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization." This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.