All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off – we do not have to stand for this.

I am not some goddess that dropped down from the sky to sing pop music; I am not some extra-incredible human person that needs to be told how wonderful they are all day and kissed.

I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in that we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race he will be advanced in life regardless of his own merits or efforts.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they’re better than other human beings.

If you want to appeal to everyone, you can’t do a world tour and expect black people to show up at every date – when you’re in Australia, when you’re in Dubai, when you’re in Indonesia.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

I am not a victim of emotional conflicts. I am human.

Let us build bridges, my friends, build bridges to human dignity across that gulf that separates black America from white America.

It doesn’t matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I’m a woman or a man.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

The story being told in ‚Star Wars‘ is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you’re in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they’re actually not.

If we do not lift up women and families, everyone will fall short.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

I don’t think marriage is a civil right, but I think that being able to transfer property is a civil right.

Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

I’m not in favour of dividing Hindus and Sikhs. I’m not in favour of dividing Hindus and Christians. All the citizens, all the voters, are my countrymen.

I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like – when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn’t look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that’s terrorism, too.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

When you truly accept that those children in some far off place in the global village have the same value as you in God’s eyes or even in just your eyes, then your life is forever changed; you see something that you can’t un-see.

I personally have always been in favor of people who are gay being permitted to marry legally – and I still feel that way.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

When you single out any particular group of people for secondary citizenship status, that’s a violation of basic human rights.

More law, less justice.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

Stupid as a man, say the women: cowardly as a woman, say the men. Stupidity in a woman is unwomanly.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can’t jail the Revolution.

You can tell the strength of a nation by the women behind its men.

Every man is a creative cause of what happens, a primum mobile with an original movement.

In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.

There are so many men and women who hold no distinctive positions but whose contribution towards the development of society has been enormous.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

I should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, you begin making exceptions to it, where will you stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?

The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.

I don’t see the point of doing an interview unless you’re going to share the things you learn in life and the mistakes you make. So to admit that I’m extremely human and have done some dark things I don’t think makes me unusual or unusually dark. I think it actually is the right thing to do, and I’d like to think it’s the nice thing to do.

We still have many neighborhoods that are racially identified. We still have many schools that even though the days of state-enforced segregation are gone, segregation because of geographical boundaries remains.

The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.

Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems.

They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do.