Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

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

From my background, I gained my regulating Christian ideals. From Gandhi I learned my operational technique.

I say good night to you by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher, who said, “We ain’t what we ought to be and we ain’t what we’re going to be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have not used time much more effectively than the people […]

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.