Creative & Constructive Coexistence

1. Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theories of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve.

2. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity.

3. As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy even if I just got a good checkup at Mayo Clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way the world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent. We are interdependent.

4. All men are interdependent. Every nation is an heir of a vast treasury of ideas and labour to which both the living and the dead of all nations have contributed. Whether we realize it or not, each of us lives eternally “in the red”. We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women. When we rise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge which is provided for us by a Pacific islander. We reach for soap that is created for us by Europeans. Then at the table we drink coffee which is provided for us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden* to more than half of the world.

* beholden : indebted

5. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for the mind, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn
down, other-centered men can build up.

6. What is needed today […] is a committed altruism which recognizes this truth. True altruism is more than the capacity to pity; it is the capacity to empathize. Pity is feeling sorry for someone; empathy is feeling sorry with someone. Empathy is fellow feeling for the person in need – his pain, agony, and burdens.

7. An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

8. Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgement. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others?

9. The ultimate measure of man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbour will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others. In dangerous valleys and hazardous pathways, he will lift some bruised and beaten brother to a higher and more noble life.

10. Courage faces fear and thereby masters it. Cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it. Courageous men never lose the zest for living even though their life situation is zestless; cowardly men, overwhelmed by the uncertainties of life, lose the will to live. We must constantly build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

11. Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. [Many] men who cherish [high] and noble ideals hide them […] for fear of being called different.

12. For years now we have heard the word “Wait!”. It rings in the ear of every Negro piercing familiarity. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never fel the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait”. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of our twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society… when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” – then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

13. There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by oppression. There comes a time when people get tired of being plunged into the abyss of exploitation and nagging injustice. The story of Montgomery is the story of fifty thousand such Negroes who were willing to substitute tired feet for tired souls, and walk the streets of Montgomery until the walls of segregation were finally battered by the forces of justice.

14. The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited masses, raising from dungeons of oppression to the bright hills of freedom, in one majestic chorus the raising masses singing, in the words of our freedom song, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around”. All over the world, like a fever, the freedom movement is spreading in the widest liberation in history. The great masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and land. They are awake and moving toward their goal like a tidal wave. You can hear them rumbling in every village, street, on the docks, in the houses, among the students […] and at political meetings. These developments should not surprise any student of history. Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.

15. There comes a time when a moral man can’t obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust. And the important thing is that when he does that, he willingly accepts the penalty because if he refuses to accept the penalty, then he becomes reckless, and he becomes an anarchist. There were those individuals in every age and generation who were willing to say, “I will be obedient to a higher law”. It is important to see that there are times when a manmade law is out of harmony with the moral law of the universe.

16. Human progress is never automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. Without persistent effort, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social destruction. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.

17. The hope of the world is still in dedicated minorities. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been in the minority. That creative minority of whites absolutely committed to civil rights can make it clear to the larger society that vacillation and procrastination on the question of racial justice can no longer be tolerated. It will take such a small committed minority to work unrelentingly to win the uncommitted majority.

18. When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love. When evil men would seek to perpetrate an unjust status quo, good men must seek to bring into being a real order of justice.