Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism... We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.

For more than two centuries our foreparents labored here without wages; they made cotton king; and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of brutal injustice and shameful humiliation - and yet out of a bottomless vitality our people continue to thrive and develop.

What seems so necessary today may not even be desirable tomorrow.

It's not the violence of the few that scares me, it's the silence of the many

Personalism's insistence that only personality-finite and infinite-is ultimately real strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me metaphysical and philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Certainly I'm not saying that you sit down and patiently accept injustice. I'm talking about a very strong force, where you stand up with all your might against an evil system, and you are not a coward.