Considering MLK

In advance of celebrating MLK, I thought I would offer some of his lesser known quotations:

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs re-structuring.
Riverside Church, NYC, April 4, 1967


I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become reality. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
http://members.aol.com/klove01/marquote.htm


A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? , 1967


Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of out time” the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dec.11, 1964


The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, 1967