I think it is a must for young people and generations yet to come, to understand, to feel, to touch, to almost smell the drama of what happened a few short years ago [the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s]. So maybe, just maybe, we will never ever repeat this unbelievable time in our history. We have to tell it all, and make it plain, and make it clear, so people will never ever forget the distance we have come, and the progress we have yet to make.
John LewisNonviolence is one of those immutable principles that we cannot and must not deviate from.
John LewisThe book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, I read it when I was about 17-and-a-half or 18. It changed my life.
John LewisI'm gonna say that I have followed every presidential campaign since the campaign of President [John F.] Kennedy in 1960.
John LewisPeople must understand that people were beaten, arrested, jailed, and some people were murdered, while attempting to register to vote, or to get others to register to vote.
John LewisI thought I was going to die a few times. On the Freedom Ride in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7th, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a State Trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death, but nothing can make me question the philosophy of nonviolence.
John Lewis