Quotes from Letters from Birmingham Jail

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

An unjust law is no law at all.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

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

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

The time is always right to do what is right.

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away.

We will have to repent, not only for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community, which has constantly refused to negotiate, is forced to confront the issue.

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.

I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever.

Quotes from Letters from Birmingham Jail part 2

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.

Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice.

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the do-nothingism of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist.

Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock?

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.

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.

I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.

We must use every legitimate means of persuasion to get our rightful demands.

The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber.

If you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it.

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

Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a constant attitude.

We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

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.

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.

We must use our resources not to store up treasures on earth where time will wear them away, but to store up treasures in heaven where neither time nor rust will decay.

I have not said to my people: ‘Get rid of your discontent.’ Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action.

Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws.

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted.

But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label.

We must substitute courage for caution.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the do-nothingism of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist.

Justice too long delayed is justice denied.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

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