Martin Luther King, Jr.

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers and sisters.

All life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother's keeper because we are our brother's brother. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay.

Evil must be attacked by. . . the day to day assault of the battering rams of justice.

Power at its best is love implementing the demand of justice.

We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an amazing patience... But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.

To be Negro in America is to hope against hope.

Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

A Church that has lost its voice for justice is a Church that has lost its relevance in the world.

Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere.

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having their legs off, and then being condemned for being a cripple.

When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that society has cut off a segment of my freedom.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

The movement for equality and justice can only be a success if it has both a mass and militant character; the barriers to be overcome require both.

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.

In the current struggle, there is one positive course of action. There is no alternative, for the alternative would connote a rear march.

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action.

Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential.

Quietly endure, silently suffer and patiently wait.