My favourite Martin Luther King quotes, listed chronologically:
1958: Stride Towards Freedom:
“Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind the Marxists like to see – an opiate of the people.”
1963: Strength to Love:
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
“Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.”
April 16th 1963: Letter From a Birmingham Jail:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws”
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice;”
April 4th 1967: Beyond Vietnam:
“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
August 16th 1967: Where Do We Go from Here:
“Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. …Negroes have half the income of whites. … twice as many unemployed; the rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites;”
“John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about $20 billion a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend $35 billion a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and $20 billion to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.”
“Yes, yes, we must stand up and say, ‘I’m black , but I’m black and beautiful.’ This, this self-affirmation is the black man’s need, made compelling by the white man’s crimes against him.”
“Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.”
December 24th 1967: A Christmas Sermon:
“We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.”
March 14th 1968: The Other America:
“a riot is the language of the unheard”
April 3rd 1968: I’ve Been to the Mountaintop:
“We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. … I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.”
– Abagond, 2017.
Sources: mainly Wikiquote (2017).
See also:
- Quoting MLK – as done by White people.
- Martin Luther King, Jr
- 1963: Letter from Birmingham Jail
- 1963: March on Washington
- I Have a Dream – video
- 1967: Beyond Vietnam – at Riverside Church
- 1967: Where Do We Go From Here?
- 1968: I’ve Been to the Mountaintop – video
- Coretta Scott King on Jeff Sessions
- The oneness of mankind
- “Black is beautiful”
- The Baltimore riot
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Awesome stuff. Thank you for sharing.
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The “Asian Avenger” strikes again! To be fair, he does have a point here. MLK’s pro Zionist stance does diminish his legacy. In his defense, most liberals bought the Zionist lie in those days.
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“Asian Avenger”, can you backup your claim with historical evidence, or should I just take your word for it? Why are you so reticent to report on your progress of liberating Asian communities from the scourge of prostitution?
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I wanted to comment here, but TIFKALOM (The Irishman Formally Known as Lord Of Mirkwood) already wrote what I wanted to write.
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“David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was pretty left-wing.
It was really the Six-Day War and the resulting expansion that resulted in the hawkish right-wing gaining the upper hand. Since then, Zionism has been seen by many Western liberals as imperialist and colonialist – justifiably so.”
Nonsense! Ethnic cleansing started prior to the founding of Israel and your pretty left-wing Ben-Gurion et al, were the ones doing it. It pains me to concede any point to the “Asian Avenger” but he is correct to state that MLK kept silent on the middle east because not doing so would have come at a cost he could ill afford to pay. Jewish support for the civil rights movement was crucial. MLK was a politician, unlike the “Asian Avenger”, what he did mattered.
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@ gro jo
You need not concede a point to kiwi until he can provide a citation for the quote that Martin Luther King, Jnr, supposedly wrote.
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A little help? I cant find it, but [para.] “dont’ work where you can’t shop,” i guess that more about race than class?
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“dont’ work where you can’t shop,” You are confused. You probably mean “Don’t buy where you can’t work”. http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/uhic/ReferenceDetailsPage/ReferenceDetailsWindow?zid=c2c7a4847dc21fd128d52a29c49b930c&action=2&documentId=GALE%7CBT2338230739&userGroupName=k12_histrc&jsid=355f6cff3a94198b092d0a770ba50edd.
“Exactly. Like all politicians, Blacks included, they will throw anyone of any race under the bus to achieve their own self-interested agendas. Blacks have never been the vanguards of human liberation. Any claim to be so, like yours, is just pretense.” Yawn.
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Ok, thanks gro jo.
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No Black History Month this year? Why? Three days from now will be the 223rd anniversary of the first, and most radical emancipation declaration on 2/4/1794. It was made possible by the action of the St-Domingue insurrectionists. Blacks are the vanguard of human liberation in the modern world. Choke on that fact Kiwi.
https://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/291/
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