The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.
All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.
Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
Seeing is not always believing.
Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.
I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.
If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.
Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.
We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.
I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.
The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.
But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.
Babies, we are told, are the latest news from heaven.
Courage faces fear and thereby masters it.
In some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.
Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.
I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable.