“The disciplined resentment of my father and mother, and the power of the mass action of the church.”

There is no future for a people who deny their past.

I am the product of the sustained indignation of a branded grandfather, the militant protest of my grandmother

The black man continues on his way. He plods wearily no longer-he is striding freedom road with the knowledge that if he hasn’t got the world in a jug, at least he has the stopper in his hand.

Press forward at all times, climbing forward toward that higher ground of the harmonious society that shapes the laws of man to the laws of God.

No one can say Christianity has failed. It has never been tried.

We have produced a world of contented bodies and discontented minds.

A man’s respect for law and order exists in precise relationship to the size of his paycheck.

Unless man is committed to the belief that all mankind are his brothers, then he labors in vain and hypocritically in the vineyards of equality.

It’s never the right time to take a particular stand.

Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.

Declare Church and State forever separate and distinct, but each free within their proper spheres, and that all church property shall bear its own proportion of taxation.

Whether I’m running on the beach without my shirt or whether I’m going out with my kids or going to church or going out to dinner.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery.

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.

That is why prayer is so exhausting and so vital. If we believed it, the prayer meeting would be as full as the church.

When the church is in mission, it is the true church.

Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.