I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

Martin Luther King Jr. used this line repeatedly in the mid-1960s as he defended nonviolent resistance amid escalating racial violence and backlash against the civil-rights movement. It appears in his 1967 book-length reflection on the movement, written after major campaigns in Birmingham and Selma and during a period when King was urging activists to resist the temptation to answer brutality with bitterness. In that setting, the statement functions as both personal resolve and public counsel: a reminder that the movement’s moral and strategic power depended on disciplined love (agape) rather than retaliatory hatred, even when facing arrests, bombings, and assassinations.

The statement contrasts love and hate not as fleeting emotions but as chosen commitments. King presents love as a deliberate ethical stance that sustains dignity and keeps the struggle oriented toward justice rather than revenge. Calling hate “too great a burden” suggests hatred is corrosive and exhausting: it consumes inner life, narrows moral imagination, and perpetuates conflict. By “sticking with love,” King affirms nonviolence as both strategy and worldview—love becomes the force capable of resisting oppression without mirroring it, aiming ultimately at transformation of social relations rather than mere victory over an enemy.