“Send forth a tiny ripple of hope.”

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.

What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us.

Nations around the world look to us for the leadership not merely by strength of arms but by strength of our convictions.

Men and women with freed minds may often be mistaken, but they are seldom fooled. They may be influenced, but they cannot be intimidated. They may be perplexed, but they will never be lost.

I think there is an obligation on the part of all of us to stay informed and aware.

The sharpest criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country.

We know that if one man’s rights are denied, the rights of all are endangered.

A life without criticism is not worth living.

If freedom makes social progress possible, so social progress strengthens and enlarges freedom. The two are inseparable partners in the great adventure of humanity.

There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of the comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others.

Despair exists only when there is hope.

There is hope in people, not in society, not in systems, but in you and me.

The purpose of life is to believe, to hope, and to strive.

Never say any man is hopeless, because he only represents a character, a bundle of habits, which can be checked by new and better ones. Character is repeated habits, and repeated habits alone can reform character.

No matter how hard life is, don’t lose hope

He who buries his head deep into a nosebag full of food cannot hope to see the invisible world.

One should always look to the end of everything, how it will finally come out. For the god has shown blessedness to many only to overturn them utterly in the end.

I can’t set my hopes too high, ‘Cause every hello ends with a goodbye.