Martin Luther King Jr.

"I said to my children, 'I'm going to work and do everything that I can do to see that you get a good education. I don't ever want you to forget that there are millions of God's children who will not and cannot get a good education, and I don't want you feeling that you are better than they are. For you will never be what you ought to be until they are what they ought to be."

"In the final analysis every white minister in the South must decide for himself which course he will follow. There is no single right strategy. The important thing is for every minister to dedicate himself to the Christian ideal of brotherhood, and be sure that he is doing something positive to implement it."

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."

"The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists."

"Mother Dear, one day I'm going to turn this world upside down.--From My Brother Martin, by Christine King Farris"

"A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan."

"And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream."

"All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be."

"Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last."

"No person has the right to rain on your dreams."

"But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change. The large house in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world – wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools. We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually."

"I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good."

"Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education."

"Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself."

"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor it must be demanded by the oppressed."

"Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."

"It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society."

"Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That's the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system."

"The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important."

"Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal."