I am what I am because of who we all are.
There is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity.
Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.
Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.
The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.
I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.
The road to freedom is a difficult, hard road. It always makes for temporary setbacks.
I must face the fact, as all others in positions of leadership must do, that America today is an extremely sick nation, and that something could well happen to me at any time. I feel, though, that my cause is so right, so moral, that if I should lose my life, in some way it would aid the cause.
I’ve always tried to be what I call militantly nonviolent. I don’t believe that anyone could seriously accuse me of not being totally committed to the breakdown of segregation.
Time has been used destructively by people of ill will much more than it has been used constructively by those of good will.
If I were constantly worried about death, I couldn’t function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility philosophically.
I think that we must face the fact that in reality, you cannot have economic and political equality without having some form of social equality. I think this is inevitable.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year – in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life – there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.
There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul’s garden, which I love to have watered once a week.
The mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort.
Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.
This is a court of law, not a court of justice.
I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.