- “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
- “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
- “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
- “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”
- “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
- “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
- “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
- “Everybody can be great … because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
- “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
- “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
- “Courage is an inner resolution to go forward despite obstacles.”
- “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right.”
- “The God whom we worship is not a weak and incompetent God. He is able to beat back gigantic waves of opposition and to bring low prodigious mountains of evil. The ringing testimony of the Christian faith is that God is able.”
- “No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.”
- “Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”
- “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
- “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”
- “Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”
- “Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? … Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience ask the question, is it right? “
- “Whatever your life’s work is, do it well.”
- “There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”
- “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
- “We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.”
- “The surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.”
- “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
- “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
- “The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat.
- “You will change your mind; You will change your looks; You will change your smile, laugh, and ways but no matter what you change, you will always be you.”
- “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
- “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.”
- “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”
- “We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.”
- “When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”
- “If any earthly institution or custom conflicts with God’s will, it is your Christian duty to oppose it. “
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