The government can't make people love me, but it can keep them from lynching me.

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.

What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?

A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the state's segregation laws was democratically elected?

For more than two centuries our foreparents labored here without wages; they made cotton king; and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of brutal injustice and shameful humiliation - and yet out of a bottomless vitality our people continue to thrive and develop.

I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds of energies in rehabilitation of its poor as long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.