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Top Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes on Poverty

Top Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes on Poverty
The world knows Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. best as an American activist. He was also a Baptist Minister and a Nobel Peace Prize award winner because of his nonviolent approach to racial prejudice in America. King was not only an anti-racism activist but also a champion for a number of other human rights issues including poverty.

Even decades after his death, poverty is still an issue across the globe. King believed it was the responsibility of those with the ability to eliminate poverty to do just that; to end the pain and suffering of others. Here are the top Martin Luther King Jr. quotes on poverty which came from his written works.

Top Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes on Poverty

  1. King’s 1961 “The American Dream” Speech
    “As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars.”Read the full speech here.
  2. King’s Book “Strength to Love”
    “God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject deadening poverty.”Read more here.
  3. King’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize Address
    “A second evil which plagues the modern world is that of poverty…Almost two-thirds of the peoples of the world go to bed hungry at night. They are undernourished, ill-housed, and shabbily clad. Many of them have no houses or beds to sleep in. Their only beds are the sidewalks of the cities and the dusty roads of the villages. Most of these poverty-stricken children of God have never seen a physician or a dentist.”“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”

    “The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.’”

    Watch the acceptance speech here.

  4. King’s 1968 “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” Sermon
    “While millions enjoy an unexampled opulence in developed nations, ten thousand people die of hunger each and every day of the year in the undeveloped world.”Read more here.
  5. King’s fourth and last book, entitled “Where do we go from Here: Chaos or Community”
    “The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”Read more here.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave many speeches and sermons during his time before his assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. What he was able to accomplish has defined him as a notable leader of history in America and around the world. His legacy lives on as people around the globe continue to fight issues that still exist, like poverty. These top Martin Luther King Jr. quotes on poverty, as well as his other written words, continue to hold meaning for the people fighting to bring awareness to poverty around the globe and end the pain and suffering those in poverty must endure on a daily basis.

– Chelsea Wolfe
Photo: Wikipedia

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10 Interesting Facts About MLK

facts about MLK
As the single most influential individual associated with the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. lived life under a spotlight. His legacy continues to be praised to this day for his courage, passion for justice and his devotion to civil equality. An advocate for nonviolence, Martin Luther King Jr. brought masses together in his time to fight against oppression with words and peaceful demonstration rather than brutality, violence and war.

His birthday, now a national holiday, celebrates and teaches many of the major highlights in his life, and resulted in a nation well-versed in his incredible life, justice goals and untimely, his martyred death.

For a man so inspiring, every day words that he spoke became inspirations to the public. Speeches and statements he gave lit a flame in the hearts of people who craved social justice and equality. In honor of Black History Month, here are 10 interesting facts about MLK, one of the most profound and inspiring American heroes:

    1. Originally, Martin was not his first name—it was actually Michael. His father, Martin Luther King Sr.’s, name was also originally Michael but after a trip to Germany, he changed both Michaels to Martin in homage to the historic German, Martin Luther.
    2. He and his wife, Coretta Scott, had four children named Yolanda Denise, Martin, Dexter and Bernice Albertine.
    3. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology in 1955.
    4. He was arrested on Jan. 26, 1956, for driving 30 mph in a 25 mph zone.
    5. Just four days later on Jan. 30, his house was bombed.
    6. In 1957, it is estimated that MLK traveled more than 780,000 miles and made 208 speeches.
    7. MLK had a lifelong admiration for Gandhi and visited India in 1959—crediting Gandhi’s passive resistance techniques for his civil rights successes.
    8. The first national celebration of MLK’s birthday was not until 1986.
    9. It is estimated that more than 700 streets in the U.S. are named after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
    10. At 35, King was the youngest man to have won the Nobel Peace Prize. All of his monetary winnings from the award were put toward furthering the issue of civil rights and towards civil rights movements.

– Eastin Shipman

Sources: Nobel Prize, The Seattle Times
Photo: Biography

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10 Quotes about Life

Quotes about life
Presented here are 10 quotes about life and its values:

1. “The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”
~Mitch Albom

2. “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings … If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
~Henry David Thoreau

3. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
~Aristotle

4. “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”
~Ann Landers

5. “In the end, no thought is unthinkable, no problem unshrinkable, no two strangers unlinkable.”
~Robert Brault

6. “With patience you can even cook a stone.”
~Anonymous

7. “You can close your eyes to things you don’t want to see, but you can’t close your heart to the things you don’t want to feel.”
~Anonymous

8. “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.”
~Anonymous

9. “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations.”
~George Bernard Shaw

10. “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.”
~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As members of this society, we are challenged daily to remember inspirations like these and to value and respect the existence of every human life.

– Ashley Riley

Sources: motivationgrid 1, Quote Garden, Thinkexist, Brainy Quote 1, Brainy Quote 2, iz quotes, Flickr, Brainy Quote 3, Brainy Quote 4
Photo: Quantum Life Skills

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Top 5 Influential and Admirable Humanitarians

Harriet_Tubman_influential_people_slavery
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King is arguably one of America’s most influential civil rights activists of all times.  He was able to achieve significant political change through his non-violent protests and demonstrations, which advocated for equality between all races.  In 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work towards social justice and he selflessly donated all of the prize money of $54,123 to the civil rights movement.  He is best known for his “I Have a Dream” speech, which has inspired humanitarians all over the world.

Harriet Tubman

Tubman was an African-American who overcame slavery just so that she could save others from the same fate.  Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland in 1822 and was often beaten by her master until she was able to escape to Philadelphia in 1849. Even after escaping such a difficult life, she risked it all to return to Maryland, as well as multiple other states, in order to rescue others.  Throughout her life, she led 13 different missions that rescued 70 slaves by using the Underground Railroad.  She also spied on the Confederacy during the Civil War for the Union.

Bill Gates

Gates, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, is one of the richest men in the world and virtually has been since 1995, but many people do not realize his immense wealth is nearly $80 billion. Exactly how much Gates has pledged is not known, but he has donated at least $29 billion of his fortune to charitable causes. He donates to multiple causes, but is very devoted to eradicating malaria and as part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; multiple awards have been presented to him because of his humanitarian efforts.

Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa was a devout Catholic trained by the Sisters of Loreto who started her career of serving others by traveling to India.  There, she worked as a teacher, and having observed the extreme poverty existing in India, she started a new order called The Missionaries of Charity.  The main goal of this order was to look after the people that nobody else was looking after.  She spent 45 years of her life helping others and received the Nobel Peace Prize for actively helping the poor in every way possible.

Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi moved from India to England to study law after the death of his father in 1888.  There, he studied not only law, but also two religious texts: the Hindu Bhagavad Gita and the Bible.  He remained committed to both scriptures for the entirety of his life because the Bhagavad Gita awakened a sense of pride for India in him and the teachings of humility and forgiveness from the Bible inspired him to lead India to independence from Great Britain.

For 30 years he advocated for peaceful protests and demonstrations to lead the British to relinquish India from their hold.  He was also a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize owing to his efforts and philosophy that inspired movements for freedom and civil rights around the world.

– Kenneth W. Kliesner

Sources: Biography Online, ATI, Biography Online, Better Get a Website, Biography Online
Photo: q99.info

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Martin Luther King Quotes on Poverty

Martin Luther King Quotes on Poverty
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr will forever hold a place in the hearts of millions of people around the world. The immediate need for freedom from racism, discrimination and flat out brutality toward African Americans will forever be King’s message. However, Dr. King also used his platform to shed light on global poverty.

He expressed the need for poverty to be abolished and the need for nations to come together to combat this growing problem. Here are excerpts of Dr. King’s written documents concerning the dire need to end poverty.

Excerpts from Dr. King’s Nobel Peace Prize address in 1964:
“A second evil which plagues the modern world is that of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, it projects it’s nagging, prehensile tentacles in lands and villages all over the world. Almost two thirds of the peoples of the world go to bed hungry at night. They are undernourished, ill-housed, and shabbily clad. Many of them have no houses or beds to sleep in. Their only beds are the sidewalks of the cities and the dusty roads of the villages. Most of these poverty-stricken children of God have never seen a physician or a dentist.”

“So it is obvious that if a man is to redeem his spiritual and moral ‘lag,’ he must go all out to bridge the social and economic gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have not’s’ of the world. Poverty is one of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern life.”

“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”

“The time has come for an all- out world war against poverty.”

“The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.'”

Excerpts from Dr. King’s “Let My People Go” speech. Human Rights Day December 10, 1965:
“Africa does have spectacular savages and brutes today, but they are not black. They are the sophisticated white rulers of South Africa who profess to be cultured, religious and civilized, but whose conduct and philosophy stamp them unmistakably as modern-day barbarians.

We are in an era in which the issue of human rights is the central question confronting all nations. In this complex struggle an obvious but little appreciated fact has gained attention-the large majority of the human race is non-white-yet it is that large majority which lives in hideous poverty. While millions enjoy an unexampled opulence in developed nations, ten thousand people die of hunger each and every day of the year in the undeveloped world.”

An excerpt from “Where do we go from Here: Chaos or Community” written in 1967:
Sadly this is Dr. King’s last book before he was tragically assassinated.

“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed matter: the guaranteed income.”

“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.”

Nearly fifty years after these words were breathed, they still reign true; especially since poverty continues to be a problem for millions of people in 2013. Let us not allow Dr. King‘s words to remain in the past. We must give them life again and continue to make this world a better place, as Dr. Martin Luther King did nearly fifty years ago.

– Amy Robinson

Sources: Nobleprize, RFKSA Film, Progress,
Photo: BAR Photography