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

What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough-mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hard-heartedness?

Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power.

Many men cry Peace! Peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace.

But by all means, keep moving.

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.