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Martin Luther King Speaks

Diocesan Press Service. April 4, 1968 [64-1a]

MARTIN LUTHER KING SPEAKS

(The following are excerpts from the sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the National Cathedral in Washington, D. C., Sunday, March 31.)

..Our world is a neighborhood through our scientific and technological genius. Yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make it a brotherhood.

.. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God's universe is made.

.. Racial injustice is still the black man's burden and the white man's shame.

. At 11:00 o'clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing "In Christ There Is No East Or West", we stand at the most segregated hour.

.. Time is neutral. ... Human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability,

.. It is all right to tell a man he should lift himself by his own bootstraps but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

.. I started thinking of the fact that we spend in America millions of dollars a day to store surplus food and I said to myself, I know where we can store that food free, in the wrinkled bellies of the million of God's children all over the world who go to bed hungry at night.

.. If a man has no job or no income, he has neither life, nor liberty nor the possibility for pursuing happiness. He merely exists.

.. I submit nothing will be done until people of good will put their bodies and their souls in motion.

..Ultimately, a great nation is a compassionate nation.

.. We force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet, when they get back home, they can hardly live on the same block together.

.. It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and non-violence. It is either non-violence or non-existence.

.. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.