Quotes about Morality
It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
The time is always right, to do what's right.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
The richer we have become materially, the poorer we become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly in the air like birds and swim in the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
The true measure of a man is not how he behaves in moments of comfort and convenience but how he stands at times of controversy and challenges.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ' an unjust law is no law at all.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
To have serpentlike qualities devoid of dovelike qualities is to be passionless, mean, and selfish. To have dovelike without serpentlike qualities is to be sentimental, anemic, and aimless. We must combine strongly marked antitheses.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. 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.
noncooperation with evil is just as much a moral duty as is cooperation with good.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
The greatest blasphemy of the whole ugly process was that the white man ended up making God his partner in the exploitation of the Negro. What greater heresy has religion known? Ethical Christianity vanished and the moral nerve of religion was atrophied. This terrible distortion sullied the essential nature of Christianity.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.