Quotes about Martin Luther King

I grew up in the sixties watching B.B. King and Tito Puente and Miles Davis and Coltrane, everybody, Marvin Gaye, Jimi. And at the same time, with my left eye I was watching Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa.

Martin Luther King Jr. was not just a man of peace. He was a radical pacifist, and so he was against war across the board.

I never knew about racial segregation until Martin Luther King.

A calling is you feel – you look out and see the need – maybe it’s the need for the poor, to help poor people. Maybe it’s the need to get involved in the race problem, as Martin Luther King was – felt called.

Obama has little or nothing to do with the civil-rights movement. His roots are in Kenya, and he is shaped far more by anti-colonialism than by anything that Martin Luther King said or did.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a revolutionary, simple and plain.

I want to be like Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and John Lennon… but I want to stay alive.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of my personal heroes.

In 1974, when I started working with the material that became ‘Horses,’ a lot of our great voices had died. We’d lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

In 1999, I was in St. Louis with Martin Luther King III as we led protests against the state’s failure to hire minority contractors for highway construction projects. We went at dawn on a summer day with over a thousand people and performed acts of civil disobedience.

Barack Obama commits war crimes – Somalia, Yemen. He commits war crimes in Pakistan, Afghanistan. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to keep a spotlight on war crimes, to keep track of the innocents killed… There is a major clash.

I think that not only do saints make poor role models, they are incapable in one sense of identifying radically with those of us who are mere mortals. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s mortality says to us that here’s a figure who got up every day of his life facing tremendous odds and yet overcame them.

The sum total of what I learned about African American culture in school was Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Underground Railroad. This was more than my mom knew; she didn’t even see a black person in real life until she was 18 years old.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

Martin Luther King said, and it is sadly still true, that one of the most segregated times in America is the hour of worship.

We’ve lost leaders from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr. and countless others who have worked to bend the arc of the universe towards justice and equality. Yet, we remain undaunted, dedicated to striving for a fairer, more equal society.

Martin Luther King took us to the mountain top: I want to take us to the bank.