Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

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.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

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.

A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

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.

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

A lie cannot live.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

To be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.

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

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.