As the news began to sink in about Osama bin Laden’s death yesterday, a quote attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr. went viral:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”
The facts first – this is not a quote from Dr. King.
Yesterday before I knew that fact, I tried to track down the origins of this quote and determine if, in fact, it was said/written by Dr. King. My initial Google search produced hits. Lotsa hits. But all from blogs and aggregated quote sites without any real journalistic credibility. That was a red flag… but I kept searching, and I stumbled upon a longer version of the quote:
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. 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.”
So at this point I had more of a quote… but based on the websites publishing it, I still could not verify its origin. More red flags. I widened the scope of my search looping in more Last Word staffers and the NBC News research department. What we all begin to notice was that all the online entries of this quote were very young, even for the Internets. At this point, none of us had any confidence that the quote was genuine, but I still wanted to know more.
So I began to parse the quote and search for smaller bits of it. It was then I discovered this quote from a collection of Dr. King’s sermons:









