Quotes about Morality
To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Love yourself, if that means rational, healthy, and moral self-interest. You are commanded to do that. That is the length of life. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. You are commanded to do that. That is the breadth of life. But never forget that there is a first and even greater commandment, Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy mind. This is the height of life. And when you do this you live the complete life.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
I had been fighting too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Man's inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.
— 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.
They have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. When oppressed people willingly accept their oppression they only serve to give the oppressor a convenient justification for his acts.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Man-made laws assure justice, but a higher law produces love. No code of conduct ever persuaded a father to love his children or a husband to show affection to his wife. The law court may force him to provide bread for the family, but it cannot make him provide the bread of love.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the means.
— 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.
But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.