Martin Luther King Jr.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

We must substitute courage for caution.

Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.

Only in the darkness can you see the stars.

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

It’s not burn baby burn, but learn, baby, learn, so that you can earn, baby, earn.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

I have never accepted what many people have kindly said-namely that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it.

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

Those who trust us educate us.

Act, if you like, but you do it at your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.

There isn’t a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.

The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.

Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s house is in flames.