MLK

"All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face
to face with another problem.
Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not
cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice
which make philanthropy necessary. To accept passively an unjust system is to
cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the
oppressor.
Morality cannot be legislated but behavior can be regulated.
Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the
heartless.
There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that
we now have the resources to get rid of it.
We must rapidly begin the shift
from a "thing"-oriented society to a "person"-oriented society. When machines
and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important
than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are
incapable to being conquered.
The dispossessed of this nation -- the poor,
both white and Negro -- live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a
revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are
their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is
refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to
lift the load of poverty.
It is a sad fact that because of comfort,
complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to
injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary
spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-anti-revolutionaries."