- “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
- “Anybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t need to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”
- “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
- “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep the streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
- “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
- “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: what are you doing for others?”
- “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”
- “The end of life is not to be happy. The end of life is not to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. The end of life is to do the will of God, come what may.”
- “The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: “If I stopped to help this man, what will happen to me?” But…the good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
- “The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be…The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
- “We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.”
- “We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.”
- “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
- “When you are right, you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong you cannot be too conservative.”
- “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
- “I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good.”
- “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable….Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”
- “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”
- “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
- “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”
Millennial 