Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.

We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

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.

One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying.

I was not afraid of the words of the violent, but of the silence of the honest.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.