Student Question
What is meant by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s quote, "Our lives begin the day that we become silent about things that matter"?
Quick answer:
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s quote, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter," means that remaining silent in the face of injustice is akin to accepting it, which King viewed as immoral. He believed that silence about important issues leads to the deterioration of our humanity. Speaking out against oppression is essential to living a meaningful life.
First, we should note that the quote in the question is missing an important word that totally alters the meaning. It should read "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." This is one of King's most-quoted lines, but it is almost always quoted without attribution, which means that, without going through all of King's published papers, it is impossible to know its context. But it is not hard, if you know a little about King's philosophy, to figure out what he means.
King thought that injustice in the world had to be resisted, and that even remaining silent about injustice was more or less the same thing as accepting it. As he said in perhaps his second most famous work (behind the speech at the March on Washington):
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network...
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of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Good people could not tolerate injustice, and to "be silent" about "things that matter" was, in King's mind, immoral. To be a moral person was to resist, or at least speak out against, oppression. To fail to do so was to allow one of the things that makes us human to die, as the quote suggests.
References
What did Martin Luther King, Jr. mean by "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter?"
Although Martin Luther King, Jr. is best known for his work in the Civil Rights movement and his landmark "I Have a Dream" speech, given at the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963, his background was actually in theology, and his work and writings on civil rights were always couched in the context of social justice for everyone. In other words, African-Americans were asking for something that was (and is) due every human being: equal rights and fair treatment under the law. King spoke frequently of the need for people to speak out against that which is wrong, as in these comments he made specifically about the struggles and violence of the civil rights era:
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
On another occasion, King seemed to call on his theological background when he invoked the idea of evil forces, saying:
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
King's comment about silence bringing out the end of one's life is metaphorical, of course. He is suggesting that there is no real purpose to a life lived in apathy or resignation to the status quo, when the status quo needs to be changed. Throughout human history, human beings have been faced with the challenge of "going along" and trying to "fly under the radar" as the saying goes, or standing up, speaking out, and risking social ostracism or even malicious retribution; Nazi Germany in the years when Hitler came to power is one of the more tragic examples of the consequences of apathy, resignation, or even unawareness. Life as Germany knew it certainly ended, literally and figuratively, and one doesn't need a history book to know of the millions of innocent lives that were extinguished at the hands of the murderous Nazi regime.