Wit & Attitude Quote by Martin Luther King Jr.

King’s sentence doesn’t argue; it stalks. By choosing “hellhound,” he refuses the polite language of policy debate and instead frames discrimination as something feral, relentless, and engineered to terrorize. The image matters: a hound doesn’t merely chase, it is trained, set loose, rewarded. In other words, racism isn’t just personal prejudice drifting through the air; it is a social instrument, disciplined by institutions and habits, that bites on schedule.

“Gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment” is calibrated to counter the nation’s favorite alibi: that discrimination is occasional, regional, or exaggerated. King insists it is ambient and continuous, an attack on attention itself. The phrase “every waking moment” also implies there is no safe ordinary life; even rest is haunted, because the threat is psychological as much as physical.

The sharpest move comes in the pivot to epistemology: “the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth.” King targets the core mechanism of oppression: not only unequal treatment, but the production of “common sense” that makes inequality feel natural. The subtext is brutal: the damage isn’t confined to laws and wages; it seeps into self-conception, into what a child is told to expect from the world and from themselves.

Contextually, this is King at his most prosecutorial, speaking into a mid-century America eager to praise gradualism and “order.” He names discrimination as a moral emergency that colonizes daily life, forcing the dominant society to confront its own participation in maintaining the “truth” of a lie.