All Labor Has Dignity Quotes

“One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., All Labor Has Dignity

“It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he should lift himself up by his own bootstraps. It is even worse to tell a man to lift himself up by his own bootstraps when somebody is standing on the boot....I had to tell him finally that nobody else in this country has lifted themselves by their own bootstraps alone, so why expect the black man to do it?”
― Martin Luther King Jr., All Labor Has Dignity

“The fact is that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed — that’s the long, sometimes tragic and turbulent story of history. And if people who are enslaved sit around and feel that freedom is some kind of lavish dish that will be passed out on a silver platter by the federal government or by the white man while the Negro merely furnishes the appetite, he will never get his freedom.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., All Labor Has Dignity

“If we look at our history with honesty and clarity we will be forced to admit that our federal form of government has been, from the day of its birth, weakened in integrity, confused and confounded in its direction, by the unresolved race question. It is as if a political thalidomide drug taken during pregnancy caused the birth of a crippled nation.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., "All Labor Has Dignity"

“no labor is really menial unless you’re not getting adequate wages.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., "All Labor Has Dignity"

“Floods of consumer goods, superhighways, supermarkets, and Telstars [satellites] do not obscure the existence of shameful prejudice.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., "All Labor Has Dignity"

“Our nation may be able to put a man on the moon in a few years, but it still cannot find out how to put a Negro in the legislature of Mississippi or put an unemployed worker back on the job. I have nothing against exploration of the moon or the planets, but if we can reach so high that we can challenge the mysteries and dangers of space, surely we can challenge the poverty and discrimination under our feet.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., All Labor Has Dignity

“I had been fighting too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., All Labor Has Dignity

“At age fifteen, Martin entered Morehouse College in an accelerated program during World War II. As the U.S. pledged to fight fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism, King was profoundly influenced through courses in sociology, history, philosophy, literature, and religion.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., "All Labor Has Dignity"