Hate it or Love it: 50 quotes from MLK that white people can use besides ‘hate cannot drive out hate’
Every year around Martin Luther King Jr. Day everyone likes to drop an inspirational quote from Dr. King. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a multifaceted philosopher and an amazing orator with a plethora of accessible speeches, sermons and books; yet, somewhere along the way it seems as if a rule was created, restricting white people to one quote in particular:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
I don’t know the reason behind the restriction; perhaps because this is one of the better quotes to try to push the “I don’t see color; we’re one race – the human race” agenda. Or perhaps the darkness and the light can be used to represent black and white and thus play into the white savior movement. Whatever the reason may be! BlackHistoryDay.tumblr.com is here today to give you 50 quotes from Dr. King that I encourage you to keep in mind for your future references:
1. “No movement of essentially revolutionary quality can be neat and tidy.”
2. “The only answer that one can give to those who would question the readiness of the Negro for integration is that the standards of the Negro lag behind at times not because of an inherent inferiority, but because of the fact that segregation and discrimination do exist.”
3. “There is no more torturous logic than to use the tragic effects of segregation as an argument for its continuation.”
4. “It is one of the ironies of history that in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal, we’re still arguing over whether the color of a man’s skin determines the content of his character.”
5. “There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.”
6. “There are some things that we’ve got to learn to sacrifice for. And we’ve got to come to the point that we are determined not to accept a lot of things that we have been accepting in the past.”
7. “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality…”
8. “We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.”
9. “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?”
10. “Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”
11. “If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
12. “That the poor white has been put into this position, where through blindness and prejudice, he is forced to support his oppressors. And the only thing he has going for him is the false feeling that he’s superior because his skin is white—and can’t hardly eat and make his ends meet week in and week out.”
13. “Through our scientific and technological developments we have lifted our heads to the skies, and yet our feet are still firmly planted in the muck of barbarism and racial hatred. Indeed this is America’s chief moral dilemma.”
14. “To keep a group of people confined to nasty slums and dirty hovels is not a State Right, but a State Wrong.”
15. “It may be true that morals cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated.”
16. “It may be true that laws and federal action cannot change bad internal attitudes, but they can control the external effects of those internal attitudes.”
17. “The law may not be able to make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me.”
18. “Even this nation came into being with a massive act of law breaking; for what implied more civil disobedience than the Boston tea party…there’s nothing new about law breaking.”
19. “God has brought us here for this hour to tell us to save America because our white brothers is carrying it more and more to destruction and damnation.”
20. “We’re called to do it so that means we can’t stop. This should make us more determined than ever before.”
21. “Now they always tell us to cool off and I know that when you get people cooling off too much they will end up in a deep freeze. They tell us to slow up and some of them even say that the Negros in Albany out to go home and be quiet because there’s a political campaign going on and you may help elect some particular candidate that shouldn’t be in office. Well I don’t know if you have an answer for them and I don‘t know if I have an absolute answer but I want to say to those who are telling us to stop merely because a political campaign is going on that this is a moral issue for us. We’re moving on towards freedom’s land. We cannot stop our legitimate aspirations for freedom merely because some immoral person will use this for his own political aggrandizements…”
22. “We worked in this very nation 2 centuries without wages. We made cotton king; we built our homes and the homes of our masters in the midst of injustice and exploitation. Yet out of a bottomless vitality we continue to grow and to live and if the inexpressible cruelties of slavery didn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face cannot stop us.”
23. “The absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice.”
24. “As the nation passes from opposing extremist behavior to the deeper and more pervasive elements of equality, white america reaffirms its bonds to the status quo.”
25. “Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance.”
26. “It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”
27. “To find the origins of the Negro problem we must turn to the white man’s problem.”
28. “It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization to clothe their acts in the garments of righteousness.”
29. “The greatest blasphemy of the whole ugly process was that the white man ended up making God his partner in the exploitation of the Negro.”
30. “Just as the ambivalence of white Americans grows out of their oppressor status, the predicament of Negro Americans grows out of their oppressed status.”
31. “Negroes have grown accustomed now to hearing unfeeling and insensitive whites say: ‘other immigrant groups such as the Irish, the Jews and the Italians started out with similar handicaps, and yet they made it. Why haven’t the Negroes done the same?’ These questioners refuse to see that the situation of other immigrant groups a hundred years ago and the situation of the Negro today cannot be usefully compared.”
32. “The Negro was crushed, battered and brutalized, but he never gave up. He proves again that life is stronger than death.”
33. “A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. It is the desperate, suicidal cry of one who is so fed up with the powerlessness of his cave existence that he asserts that he would rather be dead than ignored.”
34. “What is needed today on the part of white America is a committed altruism which recognizes this truth.”
35. “True altruism is more than the capacity to pity; it is the capacity to empathize. Pity is feeling sorry for someone; empathy is feeling sorry with someone. Empathy is fellow feeling for the person in need— his pain, agony and burdens.”
36. “I can never be who I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made.”
37. “True education helps us on the one hand to know truth, but more than that it helps us to love truth and sacrifice for it. It gives us not only knowledge, which is power, but wisdom, which is control.”
38. “If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving.”
39. “We will move out of these mountains that have so often impeded our progress, the mountain of moral and ethical relativism, the mountain of practical materialism, the mountain of corroding hatred, bitterness and violence, and the mountain of racial segregation.”
40. “…Always have faith in the possibility of getting over to the Promised Land. Don’t become a pessimist and feel that we cannot get there; it is difficult sometimes, it is hard sometimes, but always have faith that the Promised Land can be achieved and that we can possess this land of brotherhood and peace and understanding.”
41. “An individual who is not concerned about his selfhood and his freedom is at that moment committing moral and spiritual suicide…”
42. “But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”
43. “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
44. “Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion.”
45. “Many sincere white people in the south privately oppose segregation and discrimination, but they are apprehensive lest they be publicly condemned.”
46. “’Do not conform’ is difficult advice in a generation when crowd pressures have unconsciously conditioned our minds and feet to move to the rhythmic drum beat of the status quo.”
47. “This tragic attempt to give moral sanction to an economically profitable system gave birth to the doctrine of white supremacy.”
48. “Unlike physical blindness that is usually inflicted upon individuals as a result of natural forces beyond their control, intellectual and moral blindness is a dilemma which man inflicts upon himself by his tragic misuse of freedom and his failure to use his mind to its fullest capacity.”
49. “Only through the bringing together of head and heart-intelligence and goodness shall man rise to a fulfillment of his true nature.”
50. “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
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