Quotes about Injustice
The slaveholders of America had devised with almost scientific precision their systems for keeping the Negro defenseless, emotionally and physically.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
How often have the frustrations of second-class citizenship and humiliating status led us into blind outrage against each other and the real cause and course of our dilemma been ignored?
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice ? or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
The amazing aftermath of Birmingham, the sweeping Negro Revolution, revealed to people all over the land that there are no outsiders in all these fifty states of America. When a police dog buried his fangs in the ankle of a small child in Birmingham, he buried his fangs in the ankle of every American. The bell of man's inhumanity to man does not toll for any one man. It tolls for you, for me, for all of us.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
When a police dog buried his fangs in the ankle of a small child in Birmingham, he buried his fangs in the ankle of every American. The bell of man's inhumanity to man does not toll for any one man. It tolls for you, for me, for all of us.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
I am sorry to have to say that the vast majority of white Americans are racist, either consciously or unconsciously.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.