Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys. The aftermath of the ‘fight with fire’ method...is bitterness and chaos, the aftermath of the love method is reconciliation and creation of the beloved community...Yes , love-which means understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill, even for one’s enemies-is the solution

Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

Let us therefore continue our triumphal march to the realization of the American dream... for all of us today, the battle is in our hands... The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways that lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions... We are still in for the season of suffering... How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever... our God is marching on.

The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

It is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.