All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don’t. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.
But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?
Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.
I thought they’d get one of us, but Jack, after all he’s been through, never worried about it I thought it would be me.
I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.
If any man claims the Negro should be content… let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.
It is not enough to understand, or to see clearly. The future will be shaped in the arena of human activity, by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task.
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Now I can go back to being ruthless again.
One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.
Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.
The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means.
There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.
Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.
Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.
