Quotes about Equality

Very few people will rise to the heights of genius in the arts and the sciences; very few collectively will rise to certain professions. Most of us will have to be content to work in the fields and in the factories and on the streets. But we must see the dignity of all labor.

It seems to me that this is the method that must guide the actions of the Negro in the present crisis in race relations. Through nonviolent resistance the Negro will be able to rise to the noble height of opposing the unjust system while loving the perpetrators of the system. The Negro must work passionately and unrelentingly for full stature as a citizen, but he must not use inferior methods to gain it. He must never come to terms with falsehood, malice, hate, or destruction.

Nonviolence, the answer to the Negroes' need, may become the answer to the most desperate need of all humanity.

Their objectives included the elimination of Birmingham's rigid segregation. They wanted the right to vote. They wanted jobs and the ability to try on clothes in all the places where they shopped. They wanted public schools opened to all children without regard to the color of their skin.

We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.

Yes we have learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we have not learned the simple art of walking the earth as brothers and sisters.

It is not enough for the church to be active in the realm of ideas; it must move out to the arena of social action.

Why does misery constantly haunt the Negro?

The Negro knows he is right. he has not organized for conquest or to gain spoils or to enslave those who have injured him. His goal is not to capture that which belongs to someone else. He merely wants and will have what is honorably his.

I had been fighting too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns.

If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail.

On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.