Life Quotes

For too long the depth of racism in American life has been underestimated. The surgery to extract it is necessarily complex and detailed.

Just as a doctor will occasionally reopen a wound, because a dangerous infection hovers beneath the half-healed surface, the revolution for human rights is opening up unhealthy areas in American life and permitting a new and wholesome healing to take place.

Whatever career you may choose for yourself-doctor, lawyer, teacher-let me propose an avocation to be pursued along with it. Become a dedicated fighter for civil rights. Make it a central part of your life. It will make you a better doctor, a better lawyer, a better teacher.

They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderer.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

Go out this morning. Love yourself, and that means rational and healthy self-interest. You are commanded to do that. That's the length of life. Then follow that: Love your neighbor as you love yourself. You are commanded to do that. That's the breadth of life.

I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.

The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.

You know, a lot of people don't love themselves. And they go through life with deep and haunting emotional conflicts. So the length of life means that you must love yourself. And you know what loving yourself also means? It means that you've got to accept yourself.

There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.

We stand in life at midnight; we are always on the threshold of a new dawn.

I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him.

Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end.

If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.

A few years ago in the slum areas of Atlanta, a Negro guitarist used to sing almost daily: "Been down so long that down don't bother me." This is the type of negative freedom and resignation that often engulfs the life of the oppressed.

If man fails to reorientate his life around moral and ethical values he may well destroy himself by the misuse of his own instrument.

A court order can only declare rights; it can never thoroughly deliver them. And only when people themselves begin to act, are rights which are on thin paper given life blood. And so the Negro must supplement all that is done through legislation, through voting, and through the courts with non-violent direct action.

Less than a century ago the laborer had no rights, little or no respect, and led a life which was socially submerged and barren.

This note was a promise that all men, yes black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.