Quotes about Struggle

As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love. Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. Always avoid violence. If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.

The daily life of the Negro is still lived in the basement of the Great Society. He is still at the bottom despite the few who have penetrated to slightly higher levels. Even where the door has been forced partially open, mobility for the Negro is still sharply restricted. There is often no bottom at which to start, and when there is, there is almost always no room at the top.

The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited masses rising from dungeons of oppression to the bright hills of freedom in one majestic chorus

Today's despair is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow's justice.

freedom is not given, it is won.

Freedom is not won by a passive acceptance of suffering. Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering.

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

He explains how all African Americans involved in our own liberation struggle came to embody the dignity of moral conviction and self-sacrifice. Importantly, he explains here how the way of nonviolence heals the oppressed as well as the oppressor.

Why does misery constantly haunt the Negro?

I had been fighting too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns.

If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail.

Only in the darkness can you see the stars.