Quotes about Change
Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
First, the line of progress is never straight. For a period a movement may follow a straight line and then it encounters obstacles and the path bends. It is like curving around a mountain when you are approaching a city. Often if feels as though you were moving backwards, and you lose sight of your goal: but in fact you are moving ahead, and soon you will see the city again, closer by.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
We ain't what we oughta be. We ain't what we want to be. We ain't what we gonna be. But, thank God, we ain't what we was.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
We can all get more together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power. Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to effect change, and we need power.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
you will change your mind; You will change your looks; You will change your smile,laugh, and ways but no matter what you change, you will always be you
— 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.
Nonviolence is power, but it is the right and good use of power.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
The arch of History is long, but it bends towards justice.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting. If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
In short, the Negroes' problem cannot be solved unless the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice.
— 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.