"I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good."

"It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps."

"Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase."

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy."

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate…"