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Hate
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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.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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It's not only necessary to know how to go about loving your enemies, but also to go down into the question of why we should love our enemies. I think the first reason that we should love our enemies, and I think this was at the very center of Jesus' thinking, is this: that hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that's the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil.
delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL
-Martin Luther King, Jr., from sermon Loving Your Enemies, November 17, 1957
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There's another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. ... For the person who hates, the true becomes false and the false becomes true. That's what hate does.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., Loving Your Enemies (sermon), November 17, 1957
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Hell
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The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Help
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We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Humanity
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Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Ignorance & Stupidity
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Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Joy, Excitement
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Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Justice
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Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
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Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, August 16, 1967
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In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law ... That would lead to anarchy. An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., Speech at the end of a four-day march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama., March 25, 1965
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Law
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Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Liberalism
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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 Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Love
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I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Mind, the
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We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Morals
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Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Obedience
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It is my hope that as the Negro plunges deeper into the quest for freedom and justice he will plunge even deeper into the philosophy of non-violence. The Negro all over the South must come to the point that he can say to his white brother: We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we will not obey your evil laws. We will soon wear you down by pure capacity to suffer.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Past, the
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The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Peace
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Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Progress
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All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963
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Property
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Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Prophecy
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I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Books by and about Martin Luther King, Jr.