Quotes about Leadership
our slogan must not be "Burn, baby, burn." It must be, "Build, baby, build." "Organize, baby, organize." Yes, our slogan must be "Learn, baby, learn," so that we can earn, baby, earn.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nonviolence is power, but it is the right and good use of power.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Even where the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference to this obligation of citizenship. In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
most people, and Christians in particular, are thermometers that record or register the temperature of majority opinion, not thermostats that transform and regulate the temperature of society.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Everybody can be great because anybody can serve.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
I will do everything in my power to make it so by outspoken agreement whenever proper, and determined opposition whenever necessary.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
To attempt radical reform without adequate organization is like trying to sail a boat without a rudder.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
TODAY I WANT TO TELL THE CITY OF SELMA, TODAY I WANT TO SAY TO THE STATE OF ALABAMA, TODAY I WANT TO SAY TO THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA AND THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD, THAT WE ARE NOT ABOUT TO TURN AROUND.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Any Christian who blindly accepts the opinions of the majority and in fear and timidity follows a path of expediency and social approval is a mental and spiritual slave.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Just as the faults of princes must be expiated by whole nations, the errors of great minds extend their influence over whole generations and even over centuries. They grow and propagate themselves, and finally degenerate into monstrosities. All this arises from the fact that as Berkeley says: "few men think, yet all will have opinions.
— Arthur Schopenhauer