The Negro needs the white man to free him from his fears. The white man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt.

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

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that’s something that we should think about.

The minute you got the Nobel Peace Prize, things that I said yesterday, with nobody paying too much attention, I say the same things after I got it – oh! It was quite crucial for people, and it helped our morale because apartheid did look invincible.

Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other’s welfare, social justice can never be attained.

We reached a high point in my opinion with the passage of the civil rights legislation and Martin Luther King’s success and the crusade of others. I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief as if we had achieved the end of racial discrimination or white supremacy.

The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.

Civil disobedience is – it’s no fun.

We’ve come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

I think everybody’s trying to get to a place in themselves where they conquer what they was afraid of; they achieve some of their life goals, kept their word about what they were trying to do.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa, and if we’re honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

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

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

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

Those who ‚abjure‘ violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy. Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.

I came across few whites as a boy at Qunu. The local magistrate, of course, was white, as was the nearest shopkeeper. Occasionally, white travelers or policemen passed through our area. These whites appeared as grand as gods to me, and I was aware that they were to be treated with a mixture of fear and respect.

The tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free.

One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that there are people who can’t or won’t see what Black Lives Matter is trying to accomplish.

To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

Man, all lives matter.

The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.

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

I think fearless is having fears but jumping anyway.

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.

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

The man who could go to Africa and rob her of her children, and then sell them into interminable bondage, with no other motive than that which is furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved murderer that he can never receive pardon at my hand.

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.

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.

Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.

Income inequity has to be addressed.

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter – and to write it in the books of law.

Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

My son Emilio is running for Congress to continue the fight for social justice.

Gay marriage is going to happen. It must.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

Where globalization means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.

We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.

I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.

My protest about the post exchange seating bore some results. More seats were allocated for blacks, but there were still separate sections for blacks and for whites. At least I had made my men realize that something could be accomplished by speaking out, and I hoped they would be less resigned to unjust conditions.

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.

White people just don’t want their slaves to be free. That’s the whole thing.

I was scared many times on Everest, but this is all part of the challenge. When I fell down a crevasse, it was pretty scary.

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.