If… the machine of government… is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. – Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobediance, 1849

As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, 1958

I still have a dream today that one day war will come to an end, that men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, that nations will no longer rise up against nations, neither will they study war any more. – Martin Luther King,Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1968

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963