“The enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society.”

People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.

Victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed.

The natural state of a human being is dignity.

Religion is a salve for confusion and misdirection.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.

The greatest truth must be recognition that in every man, in every child is the potential for greatness.

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.

He tells so many lies that he convinces himself after a while that he’s telling the truth. He just doesn’t recognize truth or falsehood.

But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?

All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don’t. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.

You knew that what is given or granted can be taken away, that what is begged can be refused; but that what is earned is kept.

GNP measures neither our courage, our wisdom neither our compassion. It measures everything except what makes life worthwhile

The future is not a gift: it is an achievement. Every generation helps make its own future. This is the essential challenge of the present.

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.

Happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy – it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.

Your purpose explains what you are doing with your life. Your vision explains how you are living your purpose. Your goals enable you to realize your vision.

There exists a special self which takes every event as if it were the very thing you wanted to happen. That self is the Supermind, which is never upset by anything. Your goal is to nourish it into greater strength. Then, every step is sunlit.

When I set goals, they’re more tangible than becoming famous. You don’t build a company or a foundation for fame.

I never dealt with fame. It was never a goal of mine to become famous.

Anyone who has ever accomplished anything of any consequence, didn’t know how to get what they want, they only knew that they were going to get it.

We come this way but once. We can either tiptoe through life and hope we get to death without being badly bruised or we can live a full, complete life achieving our goals and realizing our wildest dreams.

Set a goal to achieve something that is so big, so exhilarating that it excites you and scares you at the same time.