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

Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority. – Martin Luther King,Jr., Strength to Love, 1963

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