Martin Luther King Jr.:

"I refuse to accept the view that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality."

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

"Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power. The time is always right to do what is right."

"There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it."

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, 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 host of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well."

"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become reality. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word."

"Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love."

"Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together or we go down together." (Speaking to striking Memphis, Tenn., sanitation workers just hours before he was assassinated, April 4, 1968.)

Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa and Nobel Prize winner:

"As I have said, the first thing is to be honest with yourself. You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself. Great peacemakers are all people of integrity, of honesty, but humility."

"As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

"During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

"Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world."

"It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership."

"If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner."

"A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination."

Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus in 1955 so a white passenger could sit:

"No matter how much a person or law may try to tell you what to do and/or deny you of your liberty, do not give up your seat on the bus of life. Don't give up your freedom and integrity. Stand for something or you'll fall for anything. Today's mighty oak is yesterday's nut that held its ground."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson:

"Both tears and sweat are salty, but they render a different result. Tears will get you sympathy; sweat will get you change."

Thurgood Marshall, first black U.S. Supreme Court justice, who as a lawyer, successfully argued "Brown v. Board of Education" in 1954 to desegregate public schools:

"Today's Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other blacks cherish."

Booker T. Washington, teacher who founded the Tuskegee Institute to train African-Americans to become carpenters, farmers, mechanics, and teachers:

"I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.

Harriet Tubman, who led hundreds of slaves to freedom in the North on the Underground Railroad:

"I looked at my hands, to see if I was the same person now I was free. There was such a glory over everything. The sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven."