Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.
Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.
It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends 500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only 53 annually on the victims of poverty.
Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.
We must learn that to expect God to do everything while we do nothing is not faith but superstition.
If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.
It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.
Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.
Mass civil disobedience can use rage as a constructive and creative force.
Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.
I would be the last to condemn the thousands of sincere and dedicated people outside the churches who have labored unselfishly through various humanitarian movements to cure the world of social evils, for I would rather a man be a committed humanist than an uncommitted Christian.
Every man is somebody because he is a child of God.
Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
We can dream of an America, and a world, in which love and not money are civilization’s bottom line.
I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism.
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.
When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.
Let’s build bridges, not walls.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.