Violence is not only impractical but immoral.
This is the unusual thing about nonviolence – nobody is defeated, everybody shares in the victory.
The poor never get the job done they are sleepy.
Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.
What I’m saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis.
A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right.
Unless you have found something in life to live for that is more important to you than your own life, you will always be a slave. For all another man needs to do is threaten to take your life to get you to do his bidding.
One of these days I’m going to put my body where my mind is.
I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself.
A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.
This Revolution is genuine because it was born from the same womb that always gives birth to massive social upheavals – the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations.
Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Many of our inner conflicts are rooted in hate. This is why the psychiatrists say, “Love or perish.” Hate is too great a burden to bear.
I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.
We should never forget that everything Adolph Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighers did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.
Unity has never meant uniformity.
The surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.
The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.
What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough-mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hard-heartedness?
If you have not discovered something you are willing to die for, then you are not fit to live.
When I am angry I can write, pray, and preach well, for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart.