The word “wait” has been a tranquilizing Thalidomide, giving birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. Only by following the cause of tender-heartedness can man matriculate into the university of eternal life. Segregation is the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality, and it cannot be cured by the Vaseline of gradualism.

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

We have now gotten the Negro the right to sit at the lunch counter. We must now get him the wherewithal to buy a hamburger.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.

I am appalled that some people feel that the civil rights struggle is over because we have a 1964 civil rights bill and a voting rights bill. Over and over again people ask, What else do you want? They feel that everything is all right. Well let them look around at our big cities.

I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste… for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

(Man) has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.