“Without Coretta Scott King, there would not have been a Martin Luther King, Jr. in the way that we know him.”

If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children.

If sexual relations between consenting adults are not part of the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution, then American democracy is in trouble.

Violence diminishes our humanity.

A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriages.

Because Dr. King was human and not divine – although we think he was divine, he was just a man, an extraordinary man, but a man – and he would get depressed from time to time and disappointed about all kinds of things relative to the movement.

It’s going to take an act of Congress to deal with poverty and hunger, not only in this country, but throughout the world. We have the resources but we don’t have the will.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn’t as good as a white child.

Behind every good man, there’s a good woman reminding you I knew you when you didn’t have nothing.

Nonviolence first changes the individual.

We have to launch a national campaign against homophobia in the black community.

Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.

Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.

When the heart is right, the mind and the body will follow.

If a man had nothing that was worth dying for, then he was not fit to live.

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.

Lesbian and gay people are a permanent part of the American workforce, who currently have no protection from the arbitrary abuse of their rights on the job.

Peace is not merely an absence of war. It is also a state of mind.

When your life is working there will be an absence of drama.

Absence, the highest form of presence.

The secret of success is that it is not the absence of failure, but the absence of envy.

The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

Adversity has the effect of drawing out strength and qualities of a man that would have laid dormant in its absence.

We don’t actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace.

If they don’t appreciate your presence, they may never recognize your absence.