Judicial decrees may not change the heart; but they can restrain the heartless.

King’s remark draws a pragmatic distinction between moral transformation and legal enforcement. He concedes that court rulings and statutes cannot by themselves produce love, empathy, or genuine interracial fellowship—changes of “heart” require deeper ethical and spiritual conversion. Yet he insists that law still matters: it can curb overtly harmful behavior, limit abuses of power, and create enforceable boundaries against discrimination and violence. In this view, legal action is not a substitute for moral progress but a necessary tool to protect the vulnerable and to create conditions in which social attitudes can gradually change. The line encapsulates King’s fusion of moral idealism with institutional realism.