“Hate the sin, love the sinner.” 

“what time can be more beautiful than the one in which the finest virtues, innocent cheerfulness and indefinable longing for love constitute the sole motives of your life?”

“In fact, you couldn't even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self-- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass-- had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.”

“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”

“Success is not reserved for a selected group of people who have silver spoons in their mouths. Those who have golden spoons in their hands can equally be satisfied by guiding their faiths to feed their dreams”

“I [am] obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, "I feel: therefore I exist." I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them "matter". I feel them changing place. This gives me "motion". Where there is an absence of matter, I call it "void", or "nothing", or "immaterial space". On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.” 

“Quizá haya cometido muchos errores, pero le diré: La misericordia de Dios es mayor que cualquier error que haya cometido. Quizá haya perdido años de su vida tomando malas decisiones, pero le diré que Dios todavía tiene una manera de llevarle hasta su destino final. Quizá haya tenido una adicción desde su adolescencia, pero le diré que el poder del Dios Altísimo puede romper cualquier adicción y liberarle. Eso es lo que significa repartir bondad: levantar al caído, animar al desalentado, tomarse tiempo para enjugar las lágrimas.”

“deal positively with your weaknesses.”

“Never try to copy a successful personality.”

“God is willing! God will save! God will rescue! God will restore! God will revive! God will empower! God willing and He will do it!”

“Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there. I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn't stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn't stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating President by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but "fear itself." But I wouldn't stop there.”

“You've got to be before you can do, and do before you can have.”

“Everyone in the world worth being nice to. Because God never creates inferior human beings, each person deserves respect and dignity.”

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.”

“We may not be able to stop satan from doing his business, but we can scheme to make his business to yield a loss! All things... I mean "all", "all things", "everything" is working for our good!”