Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical realist.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

We cannot be truly Christian people so long as we flaunt the central teachings of Jesus: brotherly love and the Golden Rule.

I have condemned any organizer of war, regardless of his rank or nationality.

If we do an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we will be a blind and toothless nation.

The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning...they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay.

Set yourself earnestly to discover what you are made to do, and then give yourself passionately to the doing of it.