A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.

How hard it is for people to live without someone to look down upon-really to look down upon. It is not just that they feel cheated out of someone to hate. It is that they are compelled to look more closely into themselves and what they don't like about themselves.

If I knew that the world ends tomorrow, I, even today, plant a tree

Life's most persistent and urgent question is: what are you doing for others? Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.

I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable

Make your way to death row and speak with the tragic victims of criminality. As they prepare to make their pathetic walk to the electric chair, their hopeless cry is that society will not forgive. Capital punishment is society's final assertion that it will not forgive.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.