If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and Earth will pause to say, Here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well. – Martin Luther King,Jr.

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. – Martin Luther King,Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1968

It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home. – Carl T. Rowan

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