Peace Martin Luther King Quotes & Sayings

Loving Your Enemies ... Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this demand is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes it is love that will save our world and civilization; love even for our enemies. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Join with the Earth and each other, to bring new life to the land, to restore the waters, to refresh the air, to renew the forests, to care for the plants, to protect the creatures, to celebrate the seas, to rejoice in the sunlight, to sing the song of the stars, to recall our destiny, to renew our spirits, to reinvigorate ur bodies, to recreate the human community, to promote justice and peace, to love our children and love one another, to join together as many and diverse expressions of one loving mystery, for the healing of the Earth and the renewal of all life. — Martin Luther King Jr.

To have peace in the world, men & nations must embrace the nonviolent assertion that ends and means must cohere. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We must shift the arms race into a 'peace race'. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being 'disturbers of the peace' and 'outside agitators.' But they went on with the conviction that they were a 'colony of heaven' and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be 'astronomically intimidated.' They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. Things are different now. The contemporary Church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the archsupporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the Church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the Church's silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The beauty of genuine brotherhood and peace is more precious than diamonds or silver or gold. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Somehow we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race which no one can win to a positive contest to harness man's creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all of the nations of the world. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of nuclear annihilation ... I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow ... I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed. — Martin Luther King Jr.

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 Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace. — Martin Luther King Jr.

John Lennon imagined a world filled with peace and love. Martin Luther King dreamt of a world free from racial discrimination and oppression. The guy who invented the Frisbee, dreamt of a world where people would throw a fat, circular object at each other in order to pass the time. He succeeded. — Jon Lajoie

We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody, that is far superior to the discords of war. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. This may well be mankind's last chance to choose between chaos and community. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We can dream of an America, and a world, in which love and not money are civilization's bottom line. — Martin Luther King Jr.

One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered as our prince of peace, of civil rights. We owe him something major that will keep his memory alive. — Morgan Freeman

We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Gandhi was inevitable. If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore Gandhi at our own risk. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Before it is too late, we must narrow the gaping chasm between our proclomations of peace and our lowly deeds which precipitate and perpetuate war. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Admitting the weighty problems and staggering disappointments, Christianity affirms that God is able to give us the power to meet them. He is able to give us inner equilibrium to stand tall amid the trials and burdens of life. He is able to provide inner peace amid our outer storms. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood. — Martin Luther King Jr.

All my adult life I have deplored violence and war as instruments for achieving solutions to mankind's problems. I am firmly committed to the creative power of nonviolence as the force which is capable of winning lasting and meaningful brotherhood and peace. — Martin Luther King Jr.

World peace through nonviolent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew. Nonviolence is a good starting point. Those of us who believe in this method can be voices of reason, sanity, and understanding amid the voices of violence, hatred, and emotion. We can very well set a mood of peace out of which a system of peace can be built. — Martin Luther King Jr.

There is no easy way to create a world where men and women can live together ... But if such a world is created in our lifetime, it will be done by rejecting the racism, materialism, and violence that has characterized Western civilization and especially by working toward a world of brotherhood, cooperation, and peace. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war. — Martin Luther King Jr.

If there is to be peace on earth and good will toward men, we must finally believe in the ultimate morality of the universe, and believe that all reality hinges on moral foundations. — Martin Luther King Jr.

His headstone said
FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST
But death is a slave's freedom
We seek the freedom of free men
And the construction of a world
Where Martin Luther King could have lived and
preached non-violence — Nikki Giovanni

Japan knows the horror of war and has suffered as no other nation under the cloud of nuclear disaster. Certainly Japan can stand strong for a world of peace. — Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. — Martin Luther King Jr.

White America has told Doc: We have created a space for you. We have allowed you to be the leader of your people for your cause. We have become comfortable seeing you in this space. This space has resulted in your receiving a Nobel Peace Prize. But that leadership and prize do not allow you to address issues outside your space. — Tavis Smiley

So, is the modern era one of mindless slaughter, war and oppression, typified by the trenches of World War One, the nuclear mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and the gory manias of Hitler and Stalin? Or is it an era of peace, epitomised by the trenches never dug in South America, the mushroom clouds that never appeared over Moscow and New York, and the serene visages of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King? — Yuval Noah Harari

I suggested then that the prize was not given merely as recognition of past achievement, but also as recognition, a more profound recognition, that the nonviolent way, the American Negro's way, was 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. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks. As they spread the propaganda of war, we must spread the propaganda of peace. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren't going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality. — Martin Luther King Jr.

God is able to give you the power to endure that which cannot be changed ... Why be anxious? Come what may, God is able. — Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the books that has guided me in the last ten years of my life to help me to be that leader is the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace. He's a Vietnamese monk. He was nominated for a Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King. — Sandra Cisneros

Darkness cannot be overcome with more darkness, only with light. Violence cannot be overcome with more violence, only with peace. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Hate destroys the hater... — Martin Luther King Jr.

At times, life is hard, as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and painful moments. Like the ever flowing water of a river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changin cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of the summers and the piercing chill of its winters. But through it all, God walks with us. Never forget that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace. — Martin Luther King Jr.

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. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Peace is not simply the absence of conflict, but the existence of justice for all people. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Let it never be said by future generations that indifference, cynicism or selfishness made us fail to live up to the ideals of humanism which the Nobel Peace Prize encapsulates. Let the strivings of us all, prove Martin Luther King Jr. to have been correct, when he said that humanity can no longer be tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war. — Nelson Mandela

There are two types of laws: there are just laws and there are unjust laws ... What is the difference between the two? ... An unjust law is a man-made code that is out of harmony with the moral law. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I object. I object to any killing at all. You know, it's terrible what happened and I think retaliation definitely makes sense and it's definitely one option. But, personally, I prefer peace. You know, maybe I'm just being ignorant and shortsighted, you know, it's true I'm not running the government, I'm not running the United States. I just don't think that killing people is a good way to remedy people dying. Martin Luther King Jr. said that you can murder a murderer but you can never murder murder itself. — Tre Cool

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. — Martin Luther King Jr.

In struggling for human dignity the oppressed people of the world must not allow themselves to become bitter or indulge in hate campaigns. To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Violence brings only temporary victories; violence, by creating many more social problems than it solves, never brings permanent peace. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can't reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Although I was too tactful to ask about politics or religion, I learned that she was socially and economically progressive. She believed in birth control, gun control, and rent control; she believed in the liberation of homosexuals and civil rights for all; she believed in Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thich Nhat Hanh; she believed in nonviolence, world peace, and yoga; she believed in the revolutionary potential of disco and the United Nations of nightclubs; she believed in national self-determination for the Third World as well as liberal democracy and regulated capitalism, which was, she said, to believe that the invisible hand of the market should wear the kid glove of socialism. Her — Viet Thanh Nguyen

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political moral questions of our time. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Many men cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Be The Peace You Wish To See In The World! — Martin Luther King Jr.

Whatever measure of influence I had as a result of the importance which the world attaches to the Nobel Peace Prize would have to be used to bring the philosophy of nonviolence to all the world's people who grapple with the age-old problem of racial injustice. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We may win a battle, but if in doing so we have planted thousands of seeds of hatred and fear..the war is not over- only the present conflict has ceased. There will be no peace as long as we react to violence with violence. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Christian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinker, and an influential member of the Tolstoy family. As a fiction writer Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Source: Wikipedia — Leo Tolstoy

It must be remembered that genuine peace is not the absence of tension, but the presence of justice. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We have come a long way in America because of Martin Luther King, Jr. He led a disciplined, nonviolent revolution under the rule of law, a revolution of values, a revolution of ideas. We've come a long way, but we still have a distance to go before all of our citizens embrace the idea of a truly interracial democracy, what I like to call the Beloved Community, a nation at peace with itself. — John Lewis

The time had come- indeed it was past due- when I had to disavow and dissociate myself from those who in the name of peace burn, maim, and kill. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Love is the most durable power in the world. This creative force is the most potent instrument available in mankind's quest for peace and security. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Sooner or later, all the peoples of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. — Martin Luther King Jr.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Nonviolence is absolute commitment to the way of love. Love is not emotional bash; it is not empty sentimentalism. It is the active outpouring of one's whole being into the being of another. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say we will not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace — Martin Luther King Jr.

Peace is not just about the absence of conflict; it's also about the presence of justice. Martin Luther King Jr. even distinguished between "the devil's peace" and God's true peace. A counterfeit peace exists when people are pacified or distracted or so beat up and tired of fighting that all seems calm. But true peace does not exist until there is justice, restoration, forgiveness. Peacemaking doesn't mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free. — Shane Claiborne

The clever use of media (i.e., TV political ads, image creations and management) kept us from raising or even addressing major problems we face as a nation - our identity, our values, our role as a resource for peace rather than war, for justice rather than its miscarriages, for people rather than corporations, for decency rather than humiliation, and for democracy rather than "hypocracy." Martin Luther King, Jr., stated it well: A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just. . . . — Anthony J. Marsella

It's hard to deny that an alarming number of those who stood for peace, not war, were either killed by deranged lone gunmen or else died in suspicious circumstances. We refer of course to the likes of JFK, Martin Luther King, Benazir Bhutto, Bobby Kennedy and John Lennon, to name but a few. — James Morcan

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s peaceful, determined struggle for social justice, and Sargent Shriver, who launched the Peace Corps, were early heroes. A career of public service was the ultimate aspiration. — Queen Noor Of Jordan

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. 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. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Unconditional love will have the final word in reality. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission - a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man". — Martin Luther King Jr.

If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. — Martin Luther King Jr.

As if the weight of such a commitment to life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances. — Martin Luther King Jr.