“Don't do anything panicky. Don't get your weapons. He who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword. . . We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries: 'Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you.' . . . We must meet hate with love. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.”

“If you are willing to give yourself away, you will have a much better life than you ever would have had trying to keep yourself.”

“When I entered Yale, I had to face two important facts about myself. First, though I could consider myself a smart enough person — I was not quite as smart as I thought I was. Second, I did not know how to do in-depth studying.”

“When one bears suffering faithfully, God is glorified and honored.”

“Many people, who should have been rejoicing for what they've achieved, are rather regretting just because of one reason; they looked at what someone else was doing. Comparison eliminates contentment and then kills inner joy!”

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”

“Jika politik itu kotor, puisi akan membersihkannya. Jika politik bengkok, sastra akan meluruskannya.”

“You can often outperform what other people think of you, but you will never outperform what you think of yourself.”

“with every action theres an equal opposite reaction,with every problem theres a solution just a matter of taking action”

“They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“If what others say doesn’t match what God has put in your heart, let it go in one ear and out the other.”

“None of us deserves God’s love. All of us deserve His righteous judgment and wrath (John 3:18, 36; Romans 3:9–12). It is easy to think of an evil and depraved man like Adolf Hitler deserving divine judgment . . .But think of the kind and good people that you know . . .They too will be lost if they refuse and neglect God’s offer of mercy and forgiveness. God’s judgment applies to them too.”

“Many Christians estimate difficulty in the light of their own resources, and thus they attempt very little, and they always fail. All giants have been weak men who did great things for God because they reckoned on His power and His presence to be with them.”

“When you know your purpose and priorities and you have ordered your day, week, or year according to them, you have a clarity of thought that strengthens everything you do.”