Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change.

It is not only poverty that torments the Negro; it is the fact of poverty amid plenty. It is a misery generated by the gulf between the affluence he sees in the mass media and the deprivation he experiences in his everyday life.

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

If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.

I feel that segregation is totally unchristian, and that it is against everything the Christian religion stands for.

The job of the school is to teach so well that family background is no longer an issue.

The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contract theory of Hobbes, the "back to nature" optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi. I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.