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Who really said it

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that

Written by Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968 · Baptist minister & civil rights leader
Verified In copyright

From King’s sermon “Loving Your Enemies,” published in his 1963 collection Strength to Love. The lines sit inside the passage “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars…” — confirmed genuine ↗.

Last verified 7 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Verified quote & credit

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that” Martin Luther King Jr., "Loving Your Enemies," in Strength to Love (1963).

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Estate of Martin Luther King Jr.). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Martin Luther King Jr. — Baptist minister & civil rights leader. Theme: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The passage in context

Author
Martin Luther King Jr.
Source
Strength to Love
Sermon
“Loving Your Enemies”
Published
1963 (Harper & Row)

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. ↑ the popular version drops the opening sentence about “deeper darkness”

King preached “Loving Your Enemies” in several settings in the late 1950s and early 1960s before publishing it in Strength to Love. The two famous sentences are almost always quoted alone, stripped of the “returning hate for hate” line that sets them up.

Strength to Love at the Stanford King Institute

How we know

  • The line is genuine King, drawn from the sermon “Loving Your Enemies” in Strength to Love (1963) — Death Penalty Information Center ↗.
  • The two famous sentences, with a reflection on King’s light-and-darkness image, are also reproduced by the National Christian Foundation ↗.
  • A widely shared 2011 version begins with a sentence King never wrote; that opening line was authored by a Facebook user named Jessica Dovey — CBS News ↗.
In copyright

Strength to Love (1963) remains under copyright, administered by the King estate. Quoting the two sentences as commentary is fair use; a scan or full reprint of the sermon is not public domain.

Fact-check

The real misquote here

The two sentences themselves are authentic King. The confusion is a different one: a version that went viral after Osama bin Laden’s death in May 2011 opened with a line King never wrote.

Martin Luther King Jr. (the “I will not rejoice” opening line) viral 2011

The much-shared sentence “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy” was written in 2011 by Jessica Dovey, a Penn State graduate teaching in Japan, as her own introduction to the real King quote. When her Facebook post was re-shared, the quotation marks dropped and her words were absorbed into King’s — CBS News ↗.

Bottom line: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness… hate cannot drive out hate” is real Martin Luther King Jr., from Strength to Love; only the “I will not rejoice” preamble that sometimes precedes it online is a later, mis-credited add-on — Christian Science Monitor ↗.

Context

Why it mattered

King built “Loving Your Enemies” around the idea that nonviolence is not passive but the only force capable of ending a cycle of retaliation. The darkness-and-light image makes the argument concrete: you cannot cancel a thing with more of the same — only its opposite will do.

Published in Strength to Love in 1963, at the height of the civil rights struggle, the sermon reframed loving one’s enemies not as sentimental weakness but as strategic and moral strength.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.

More on the sermon’s origins

King preached versions of “Loving Your Enemies” on several occasions — including at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery and at Lenten services in Detroit — before it appeared in print. The Strength to Love text is the one most often cited today.

The passage draws on the Christian concept of agape — unconditional, redemptive goodwill — which King distinguished from mere affection or liking and made the moral engine of the nonviolent movement.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

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Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Strength to Lovekinginstitute.stanford.edu

Stanford’s King Institute page on the 1963 sermon collection that contains “Loving Your Enemies.”
“Hate cannot drive out hate”deathpenaltyinfo.org

Attributes the line to “Loving Your Enemies” / Strength to Love (1963) and quotes the fuller passage.
MLK’s words on light and darknessncfgiving.com

Reproduces the two famous sentences with a reflection on King’s light-and-darkness image.
Jessica Dovey and the MLK misquotecbsnews.com

How a Facebook user’s own opening line got merged with the real King quote and misattributed in 2011.
How bin Laden’s death sparked a fake MLK quotecsmonitor.com

Contemporaneous account of the 2011 viral quote-mashup and how it was traced to its origin.
Did MLK say this? (fact-check)snopes.com

Snopes fact-check on the two sentences and the 2011 viral misattribution.

The true author

About Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

1929–1968 · Baptist minister & civil rights leader

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) was a Baptist minister and the foremost leader of the American civil rights movement, whose philosophy of nonviolent resistance was grounded in Christian agape love. Strength to Love (1963), a collection of his sermons, is where this line was published; its theme of answering hate with love runs through his entire public ministry. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” in Strength to Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

MLA (9th ed.)

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Loving Your Enemies.” Strength to Love, Harper & Row, 1963.

APA (7th ed.)

King, M. L., Jr. (1963). Strength to love. Harper & Row.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that’?” Last verified 7 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/darkness-cannot-drive-out-darkness-only-light-can-do-that

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