Today, is a national holiday in the United States in honor of the great civil rights leader, MLK Jr. May we seek to honor his memory & vision in our words & deeds.
To celebrate his 93rd birthday, below, are some lessons that we still need to learn from this inspirational figure:
A nation that spends more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.
And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom.
A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time—the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.
I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like [war] continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.
Of the good things in life the Negro has approximately one-half those of whites; of the bad he has twice those of whites.
It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes, but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a Radical Revolution of Values...
When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
(Timeless sermon, delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. one year before his assassination, below).
