The big shots are not the only ones who are important. Remember, you can't sell anything on Wall Street unless someone digs it up somewhere else first.

Change depends on people knowing the truth. Change depends on people speaking that truth out loud. That's what movements do. Movements educate people to the truth. They pass along information and ideas that many others do not know, and they cause them to ask questions, to challenge their own long-held beliefs. ... Movements are the way ordinary people get more freedom and justice. Movements are how we keep a check on power and those who abuse it.

The United States of America is the richest country in the world; yet we're the worst at taking care of poor people.

There's no job too big to benefit from a small town person's perspective, I discovered, just as there's no town too small for thinking big.

this is what I know about courage: You don't have to think about courage to have it. You don't have to feel courageous to be courageous. You don't sit down and say you're going to be courageous. At the moment of action, you don't see it as a courageous act. Courage is the most hidden thing from your eye or mind until after it's done. There's some inner something that tells you what's right. You know you have to do it to survive as a human being. You have no choice.

People were threatened, folks was put in jail just because we wanted people to try to register to vote.

To make a small town achieve its potential, you need everybody. When a blind person carries a crippled person who can see, both of them get where they're going.