Martin Luther King

Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars... Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

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

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

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.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

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 by the content of their character.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

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... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

That old law about 'an eye for an eye' leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

The time is always right to do what is right.

Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

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

* * *

Forty years ago, today...he was gunned down...for his words...

* * *