Not original to Martin Luther King Jr. — an older anonymous proverbAnonymous (a folk proverb, attested by 1897)Proverb in circulation by 1897 · popularized in the U.S. through the 20th century
The compact line “Hate destroys the hater” is a folk proverb that Quote Investigator traces to at least 1897 ↗ and whose originator it designates as anonymous. King did express the idea — in his 1957 sermon “Loving Your Enemies” he said “hate destroys the hater as well as the hated” — but he neither coined the saying nor used this exact three-word wording.
“Hate destroys the hater” is an anonymous proverb attested since 1897, not an MLK original; King preached a fuller version — “hate destroys the hater as well as the hated” — in his 1957 sermon “Loving Your Enemies.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Martin Luther King Jr.. Use the credit shown above instead.
Can you use it?
? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
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In context
Evoking the world of Martin Luther King Jr. — Baptist minister & civil-rights leader. Theme: "Hate destroys the hater". 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.
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Provenance
Where it actually comes from
Type
Anonymous proverb / adage
Earliest attestation
Henry Norman, “Real” (1897)
King’s use
“Loving Your Enemies,” Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 17 Nov 1957
Originator
Anonymous (per Quote Investigator)
Hate at any point is a cancer that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life and your existence. It is like eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center of your life. So Jesus says love, because hate destroys the hater as well as the hated.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s actual wording in the 1957 “Loving Your Enemies” sermon — the fuller thought from which the compressed proverb is often quoted in his name.
1897: Henry Norman’s book Real already frames the idea — “the nature of hatred is to first destroy the hated one and then destroy the hater” — and a July 1897 theosophy journal adds “it is a poison and destroys the hater,” per Quote Investigator ↗.
1916–1921: American speakers and papers sharpen it — Louis N. Whealton (1916): “Hate at last destroys the hater”; Peter Witt (1921): “Hate can’t injure the person hated. But it destroys the hater” (QI ↗).
1957: Martin Luther King Jr. preaches “hate destroys the hater as well as the hated” in “Loving Your Enemies” ↗ — a genuine King line, but a later and fuller instance of a decades-old proverb, not its origin.
Verdict: Quote Investigator designates the proverb’s originator as anonymous ↗; the bare three-word form is a modern compression pinned onto famous names.
The compressed line “Hate destroys the hater” has no single identifiable author — it is a folk proverb attested in varying wordings since 1897, so no clean public-domain claim attaches to this exact three-word form. King’s own fuller wording is from a 1957 sermon and would be in-copyright to the King estate; the anonymous proverb it echoes predates 1931 in its earliest attestations.
Fact-check
How it gets misattributed
The tidy three-word line is a magnet for famous names. In reality it is an anonymous proverb whose wording drifted for over a century; the figures below each used a version of it, but none originated the compact form.
✕
The most common modern creditMartin Luther King Jr. paraphrase of a genuine line
King really did preach “hate destroys the hater as well as the hated” in 1957, so quote sites shorten it to “Hate destroys the hater” and stamp his name on it — but the proverb was already in print in 1897, decades before King was born ↗.
✕
Widely shared inspirational formGeorge Washington Carver secondhand, 1954
The Carver version — “hate within will ultimately destroy the hater” — rests entirely on Alvin D. Smith’s 1954 memoir recalling Carver’s 1915–1919 Bible classes, with no earlier primary source from Carver himself ↗.
✓The saying belongs to no one famous: Quote Investigator concludes the proverb’s originator is anonymous ↗, evolving through many voices from 1897 onward.
Context
Why it matters
The line survives because it compresses a moral intuition — that hatred corrodes the one who holds it — into three words. That very compression is what lets it float free of any real source and attach to whichever admired figure a reader trusts most.
King’s authentic teaching on this theme is richer than the slogan: in Loving Your Enemies he called hate “a cancer that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life,” and in Strength to Love (1963) he wrote that “like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality.” Crediting him with the bare proverb flattens that into a bumper sticker.
A genuine King idea — but a proverb older than King himself.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1929–1968 · Baptist minister & civil-rights leader
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) led the American civil-rights movement and, as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, built much of his ethic of nonviolence around the destructive power of hatred. In his 1957 sermon Loving Your Enemies he preached that “hate destroys the hater as well as the hated” — a genuine King line. But the bare proverb “Hate destroys the hater” predates him by decades and belongs to no single author.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Quote Investigator / King Institute
Earliest documented in Henry Norman, Real (1897) and A. P. Buchman, The Theosophical Forum (July 1897); King’s fuller wording in Martin Luther King Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Ala., 17 November 1957. Provenance per Quote Investigator (2020).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Hate destroys the hater’?” Last verified 8 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/hate-destroys-the-hater