“Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

“We must condemn those who are perpetuating the violence, and not the individuals who engage in the pursuit of their constitutional rights.”

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

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

“But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.”

“If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

“Whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent”

“Only God is able. It is faith in Him that we must rediscover. With this faith we can transform bleak and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of joy and bring new light into the dark caverns of pessimism.”

“We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.”

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

“To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.”

“I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable”

“One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.”