We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

Courageous men never lose the zest for living even though their life situation is zestless; cowardly men, overwhelmed by the uncertainties of life, lose the will to live.

I submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.

Freedom has always been an expensive thing. History is fit testimony to the fact that freedom is rarely gained without sacrifice and self-denial.

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.

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.

May I stress the need for courageous, intelligent, and dedicated leadership… Leaders of sound integrity. Leaders not in love with publicity, but in love with justice. Leaders not in love with money, but in love with humanity. Leaders who can subject their particular egos to the greatness of the cause.

Courage faces fear and thereby masters it.

Our children need our presence, not our presents.

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

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life 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.

Only in the darkness can you see the stars.

I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will.

Darkness cannot be overcome with more darkness, only with light. Violence cannot be overcome with more violence, only with peace.

Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Never, never be afraid to do what’s right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.

We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.

We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

There comes a time when silence is betrayal.

A riot is the language of the unheard.

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

Stumbling and groping through the wilderness finally must be replaced by a planned, organized and orderly march.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert.

Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue.

Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

The more there are riots, the more repressive action will take place, and the more we face the danger of a right-wing takeover and eventually a fascist society.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society… shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

In spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace.

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

We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.

We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that would praise you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward Jim Clark,’ but will curse and damn you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.’ There is something wrong with that press.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the positive affirmation of peace.

The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves.

For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.

It’s not the violence of the few that scares me, it’s the silence of the many.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.