The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others.

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep 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.

The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.

Nonviolence is the most potent technique for oppressed people. Unearned suffering is redemptive.