“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”

“We are going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. So however difficult it is during this period, however difficult it is to continue to live with the agony and the continued existence of racism, however difficult it is to live amidst the constant hurt, the constant insult and the constant disrespect, I can still sing we shall overcome. We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne."   Yet that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the Bible is right.  "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all of God's children all over this nation - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, "Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We are Free At Last.”

“If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.”

“Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self assertive humble. ...truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two.”

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.”

“We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.”

“We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience.”

“Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

“This is the unusual thing about nonviolence -- nobody is defeated, everybody shares in the victory.”

“I have a dream. I have a dream that one day, people will be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.”

“Without love, there is no reason to know anyone, for love will in the end connect us to our neighbors, our children and our hearts.”

“He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.”

“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”

“Today it is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence; it is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”

“One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.”