The ideals and principles for which Dr King fought have never been forgotten and are as relevant today as they were 40 years ago.

Civil disobedience is – it’s no fun.

What I believe unites the people of this nation, regardless of race or region or party, young or old, rich or poor, is the simple, profound belief in opportunity for all – the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead.

Here’s the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it’s put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don’t call them a white film. I’m trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.

The peasant must always be helped technically, economically, morally and culturally. The guerrilla fighter will be a sort of guiding angel who has fallen into the zone, helping the poor always and bothering the rich as little as possible in the first phases of the war.

The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

Some say we should not engage in activism. Instead we should leave everything to our politicians and just vote for a change instead. But what do we do when there is no political will? What do we do when the politics needed are nowhere in sight?

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

I’m a lad of the ’60s. I started a magazine to try and end the Vietnam war, but it was a number of years before I had the profile, the financial resources and the time to do more.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

Particularly conservative Christians, I was very angry that they were not involved more in the AIDS emergency.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.

The symbolism of the climate strike is that if you adults don’t give a damn about my future, I won’t either.

After the chaos and carnage of September 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

Nothing is being done to stop the climate and ecological emergency from happening and to secure the future wellbeing for future generations.

I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it’s one that’s easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

It’s a blessing that South Africa has a man like Nelson Mandela.

The battle for women’s rights has been largely won.

I’m a warrior for the middle class.

Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America – there’s the United States of America.

We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.

Gay marriage is going to happen. It must.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

When I do a picture and it’s 90% black, like ‚Bird,‘ I use 90% black people.

Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

All of these young people have some kind of potential in them. And if we don’t invest in them as a nation, regardless of where they come from or what color they are, if we don’t invest in them, we lose.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one – it’s the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky – in the big cities, too, for that matter.

That old law about ‚an eye for an eye‘ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

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

For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.

I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.

I was a proponent of the ERA. The women of my generation and my daughter’s generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

Growing up, I decided, a long time ago, I wouldn’t accept any manmade differences between human beings, differences made at somebody else’s insistence or someone else’s whim or convenience.

The community which has neither poverty nor riches will always have the noblest principles.

If proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream.

Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.

Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not, then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right?

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

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

Science is global. Einstein’s equation, E=mc2, has to reach everywhere. Science is a beautiful gift to humanity, we should not distort it. Science does not differentiate between multiple races.

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.

No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it.

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people.