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Why We Can't Wait QUOTES

Why We Can't Wait QUOTES

1 " Quietly endure, silently suffer and patiently wait. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

2 " Find a voice in a whisper. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

3 " Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to work to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

4 " Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

5 " No one can pretend that because a people may be oppressed, every individual member is virtuous and worthy. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

6 " We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

7 " We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man's life was sacred only if we agreed with his views. This may explain the cascading grief that flooded the country in late November. We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

8 " ...The straitjackets of race prejudice and discrimination do not wear only southern labels. The subtle, psychological technique of the North has approached in its ugliness and victimization of the Negro the outright terror and open brutality of the South. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

9 " We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

10 " The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning...they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

11 " A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

12 " This Revolution is genuine because it was born from the same womb that always gives birth to massive social upheavals - the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

13 " 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. , Why We Can't Wait

14 " Lightning makes no sound until it strikes. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

15 " The conservatives who say, "Let us not move so fast," and the extremists who say, "Let us go out and whip the world ," would tell you that they are as far apart as the poles. But there is a striking parallel: They accomplish nothing; for they do not reach the people who have a crying need to be free. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

16 " Unity has never meant uniformity. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

17 " Lamentably, it is a 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. , Why We Can't Wait

18 " Human beings with all their faults and strengths constitute the mechanism of a social movement. They must make mistakes and learn from them, make more mistakes and learn anew. They must taste defeat as well as success, and discover how to live with each. Time and action are the teachers. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

19 " I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. 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. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait

20 " Even today there still exists in the South--and in certain areas of the North--the license that our society allows to unjust officials who implement their authority in the name of justice to practice injustice against minorities. Where, in the days of slavery, social license and custom placed the unbridled power of the whip in the hands of overseers and masters, today--especially in the southern half of the nation--armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence and death and conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, maim or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner. If one doubts this conclusion, let him search the records and find how rarely in any southern state a police officer has been punished for abusing a Negro. "

― Martin Luther King Jr. , Why We Can't Wait