Who doesn’t enjoy a good Martin Luther King, Jr. quote for some inspiration, eh? I just read this and it made me happy:

“I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
From the sermon “But, If Not” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on November 5, 1967.

Thanks, Tim.


Subscribe to comments Comment | Trackback |
Post Tags: , ,

Browse Timeline


  • Obama is a damn good speaker, yes. But putting him in the same ranks as King might be a stretch. We'll see how he does in the White House. ;)
  • I think that Obama speaks as well as King did.
  • yup
blog comments powered by Disqus

Creative Commons License

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

This is The Poverty Jet Set. Ride on, space cowboys!
Wordpress theme "Modicus Remix" by Zidalgo.