Quotes & Sayings About Martin Luther King Speech

The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest. That's all. — Martin Luther King Jr.

How, then, has Obama been saddled with an image of being long on inspiration and short on details? The answer is that journalists are not accustomed to covering a candidate who moves crowds the way Obama does, who uses speech cadences and rhythm like Martin Luther King Jr. without making his talk explicitly about race. Sen. Clinton already owned the policy-wonk slot, so by default, Obama was cast as the poetic one. — Howard Kurtz

Learn from Past, apply them in Present & make better Future. — Amresh Kumar

Destiny strips at the Melon Patch. They're people Ted, try to keep 'em straight. — Barney Stinson

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Everyone knows, even the smallest kid knows about Martin Luther King Jr., can say his most famous moment was that 'I have a dream speech. No one can go further than one sentence. All we know is that this had a dream. We do not know what the dream was'. — Henry Louis Taylor Jr.

Remember how I told you that a person's conduct is the first hint we have of a person's character. Sometimes that's all we have a chance to see. Their conduct is a manifestation of their character. You agreed. Remember, Dr. King? That was going to be part of the speech, and that's going to help out a lot of people - black and white - in the future if you include those words. — Glen Shuld

Reality can't live up to your expectations because you keep building new expectations. — Loretta Graziano Breuning

Martin Luther King's 1963 'I have a dream' speech was a thrilling milestone in the civil rights movement, so enduring that we tend to attribute its searing power to a kind of magic. But Gary Younge's meditative retrospection on its significance reminds us of all the micro-moments of transformation behind the scenes
the thought and preparation, vision and revision
whose currency fed that magnificent lightning bolt in history. — Patricia J. Williams

It was so crucial to the Civil Rights Movement that on June 23, 1963, Martin Luther King came to town, walked down Woodward Avenue with more than 100,000 people and delivered the first major public iteration of his "I Have A Dream" speech, two months before he did it in Washington. — David Maraniss

Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech always sends me down some path, some trajectory of some creative idea. — Abigail Washburn

Martin Luther King gave the 'I Have a Dream' speech, not the 'I Have a Plan' speech. — Simon Sinek

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city. — Martin Luther King Jr.

If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, Maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions ... But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Curtailment of free speech is rationalized on grounds that a more compelling American tradition forbids criticism of the government when the nation is at war ... Nothing can be more destructive of our fundamental democratic traditions than the vicious effort to silence dissenters. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Freedom rings bells to wake us from the comfort of beautiful dreams and empower the efforts that turn them into reality. — Aberjhani

Form is the shape of content ... — Ben Shahn

The instant is gone, time has carried us into the realm of memory, it was like this, no, it was not, and everything becomes what we choose to invent. — Jose Saramago

We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. — Martin Luther King Jr.

In financial terms, my sense is that the distribution of wealth, unequal as it is, is self-perpetuating, and, especially in a linked and accelerating world, the rich get ever more quickly richer while the poor get ever more speedily poorer. — Pico Iyer

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We ain't what we oughta be. We ain't what we want to be. We ain't what we gonna be. But, thank God, we ain't what we was. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I'm an actor who directs. Probably always will be. — Clark Johnson

A horsefly can't do a horse much real damage, but it can drive it wild anyhow. — Harry Turtledove

If a man hasn't found something he will die for, he isn't fit to live. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We [Americans] know Martin Luther King Jr. as a statue. We know him as a holiday. We know him as a speech. We don't know him as a man. Most people don't even know the whole speech, just "I have a dream." They don't know what his speaking voice was like, how he looked at his wife, or that he had four kids. — Ava DuVernay

Truth crushed to earth will rise again. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Smoke was a person with a sense of history. Do you know what I mean? ... in truth, I DID know what she meant. Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, Bette Davis - if you read their definitive biographies, you learned even when they were a month old, cooing in some wobbly crib in the middle of nowhere, they already had something historic about them. The way other kids had baseball, long division, Hot Wheels, and hula hoops, these kids had History and thus tended to be prone to colds, unpopular, sometimes plagued with a physical deformity (Lord Byron's clubfoot, Maugham's severe stutter, for example), which pushed them into exile in their heads. It was there they began to dream of human anatomy, civil rights, conquering Asia, a lost speech and being (within a span of four years) a jezebel, a marked woman, a little fox and an old maid. — Marisha Pessl

But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley's West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Gun control advocates need to realize that passing laws that honest gun owners will not obey is a self-defeating strategy. Gun owners are not about to surrender their rights, and only the most foolish of politicians would risk the stability of the government by trying to use the force of the state to disarm the people. — J. Neil Schulman

Nobody's sex life is such that every experience is a ten. You may have to be satisfied with regular eights or sixes and even an occasional three. — Kevin Leman

All of us are somewhat beastly, you know," he added.
"He just wears his beastliness where everyone can see it." To my surprise, he chuckled, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "At least you know what you're getting into, right? — Sarah E. Boucher

We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Kisses all on her body, she tells me live in the moment — Drake

You can listen to the secrets of life
in the silence of night,
in the voice of the ocean,
in the beating of your heart.
Just listen with your soul. — Debasish Mridha

If I condemn something, I do not understand it. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Nothing needs to happen to a writer's life after they are 20. By then they've experienced more than enough to last their creative life. — Flannery O'Connor