Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.

Children cannot lobby and cannot vote. We must speak for them.

So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy's assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.

I never thought I was breaking a glass ceiling. I just had to do what I had to do, and it never occurred to me not to.

History does not pose problems without eventually producing the solutions.

There were these great women in Montgomery, [Rosa Louise] Parks was among them. Jo Ann Robinson [who organized the bus boycott] was among them. It's always these ordinary women and men of grace who have been waiting and seething and planning to change things that are unjust that bring movement.

Let all children come unto me.