“I am tired of seeing people battered and bruised and bloody, injured and jumped on, along the Jericho Roads of life.”

“I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself.”

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“To have serpentlike qualities devoid of dovelike qualities is to be passionless, mean, and selfish. To have dovelike without serpentlike qualities is to be sentimental, anemic, and aimless. We must combine strongly marked antitheses.”

“Ik raakte ervan overtuigd dat niet meewerken aan een slechte zaak net zo goed een morele verplichting inhoudt als meewerken aan iets goeds.”

“Not everybody can be famous but everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.”

“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.”

“Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”

“Unity has never meant uniformity.”

“I always contended that we as a race must not seek to rise from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, but to create a moral balance in society where democracy and brotherhood would be reality for all men.”

“We are going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. So however difficult it is during this period, however difficult it is to continue to live with the agony and the continued existence of racism, however difficult it is to live amidst the constant hurt, the constant insult and the constant disrespect, I can still sing we shall overcome. We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne."   Yet that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the Bible is right.  "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all of God's children all over this nation - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, "Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We are Free At Last.”

“We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.”

“Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you're nobody.”

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

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