Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the defensive, cringing. This time they were taking the initiative.

I’ve never been involved in a Civil Rights campaign that was not ill-timed

We will have demonstrations until the injustices that have caused them are eliminated.

Rosa Parks showed us all that one little person can make a whole bunch of noise without so much as a whisper.

The March on Washington was not a climax but a new beginning.

Mr. President, we are going to march on Washington. The people are restless. The Black masses are restless.

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.

I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.

When people discuss the 1960s and the great Civil Rights Era, they often speak in romantic terms as if there wasn't immense work put in, and as if there wasn't immense sacrifice that took place. But none of those battles were easily fought and won; there were sustained movements behind them.

Even here in America, people are fighting for civil rights 45 years after the civil rights movement.

My earliest memories are of the civil rights era. My earliest experiences were rage.

We have a tendency to sugar coat the Civil Rights movement by showing arm in arm and everyone singing 'Kumbaya'. We don't really always show the resistance from the government, the resistance from the status quo, from the majority to silence the movement.

We may very well be making history here ... in the presence of the man who is entrusted with the banner of American liberty that was taken from Lincoln when he was shot 95 years ago … Dr. King was almost stabbed to death, has been shot at, has been arrested more often than anybody in the United States, south and north … Dr. King’s life at this moment is in just as great danger as was Lincoln’s. And he has to walk with care if he is to continue to lead this crusade

Please tell the Attorney General that we have been cooling off for 350 years. If we cool off any more, we’ll be in the deep freeze. The Freedom Rides will go on.

The signs and banners of protesters are the zoom lenses by which we can focus on the difficult issues of a society.

We are on the threshold of a significant breakthrough, and the greatest weapon is the mass demonstration.

Martin Luther King told American Blacks not to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

I want you to leave here with a sense of mission. Martin Luther King is waiting for you to march with him.

At the end of the day, the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott had to be converted into the 1964 Civil Rights Act. We don't want politicians who've gotta be coaxed, cajoled and protested. We want them on our side from the beginning.

Boycotts have been a critical part of social justice in American history, particularly for African-Americans.

This is how a revolution begins. It begins when someone grows tired of standing idly by, waiting for history's arc to bend toward justice, and instead decides to give it a swift shove. It begins when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in the segregated South.

I want some help on this. I'm being very honest, i want some ideas, as somebody who was arrested 50 years ago fighting for Civil Rights trying to desegregate schools in Chicago, who spent his whole life fighting against racism, I want your ideas. What do you think we can do? What can we do?

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.