Some Words of Wisdom

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

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.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Freedom has always been an expensive thing.

Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.

What a bit of irony it is that we have in the past decade created machines that think and with them people who fear to think.

You must not become morbidly absorbed in a past mistake but you must seek to outlive it by creative living in the future.

Through violence you may murder a murderer but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."

I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land! So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man.
Speech at Clayborn Temple, Memphis, Tennessee, April 3, 1968, the evening before his assassination.

Today Martin Luther King would have 73 years old. Happy birthday, Dr. King.