Civil Rights and Responsibilities
"Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored". (from Letter from Birmingham City Jail, April 16, 1963)
"This award which I received on behalf of the [civil rights] movement is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time - the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression." (From Dr. King's 1964 Nobel Peace Price acceptance speech)
"Sooner or later, all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace...If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love." (From Dr. King's 1964 Nobel Peace Price acceptance speech)
"Nonresistance attacks the forces of evil rather than the persons who happen to be doing the evil. As I said to the people of Montgomery: The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tensions, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness." (Source: William L. Katz. Eyewitness: Negro in American History, New York, 1967, 511)
"It must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not for cowards. Nonviolent resistance does resist. If one uses this method because he is afraid or merely because he lacks the weapons of violence, he is not truly nonviolent..." (Source: William L. Katz. Eyewitness: Negro in American History, New York, 1967, 511)
"The nonviolent resistance of the early Christians shook the Roman Empire. The nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi and his followers muzzled the guns of the British Empire in India and freed more than 350,000,000 people from colonialism. It brought victory in the Montgomery bus boycott..." (Source: William L. Katz. Eyewitness: Negro in American History, New York, 1967, 511)
"Nonviolence does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him." (Source: William L. Katz. Eyewitness: Negro in American History, New York, 1967, 511)
"Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country." (from Letter from Birmingham City Jail, April 16, 1963)
"You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being." (from Letter from Birmingham City Jail, April 16, 1963)
"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality." (From Dr. King's 1964 Nobel Peace Price acceptance speech)
"I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hall of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality." (From Dr. King's 1964 Nobel Peace Price acceptance speech)
"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up..." (From Dr. King's 1964 Nobel Peace Price acceptance speech)
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character." (From "I Have a Dream," August 28, 1963, Washington, DC)
"In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred." (From "I Have a Dream," August 28, 1963, Washington, DC)
"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood." (From "I Have a Dream," August 28, 1963, Washington, DC)
"When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village 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!" (From "I Have a Dream," August 28, 1963, Washington, DC)
"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." (from Letter from Birmingham City Jail, April 16, 1963)