Martin Luther King, Jr. Creative Quotations

The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be... The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

Love is the most durable power in the world. This creative force is the most potent instrument available in mankind's quest for peace and security.

Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force.

Love is the only creative, redemptive, transforming power, in the universe.

The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.

But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.

Agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it's what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them.

I am not afraid of the word tension.

Non-violent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored... I am not afraid of the word tension. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, and there is a type of constructive tension that is necessary for growth.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

There's something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.

Hate destroys the very structure of the personality of the hater.... when you start hating anybody, it destroys the very center of your creative response to life and the universe; so love everybody.

Perhaps...the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

Sooner or later, all the peoples of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.