I compare it [the movement] to the Exodus stories. If no one had told the Exodus stories, it would not have inspired people throughout the world for thousands of years.

Working in a social struggle is not necessarily rewarding. There are no retirement plans.

Even though [the Hartford speech] was one of his standard speeches, every time he gave it there were variations.

But America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress. It seems to me that your moral progress lags behind your scientific progress. Your poet Thoreau used to talk about “improved means to an unimproved end.” How often this is true. You have allowed the material means by which you live to outdistance the spiritual ends for which you live. You have allowed your mentality to outrun your morality. You have allowed your civilization to outdistance your culture. Through your scientific genius you have made of the world a neighborhood, but through your moral and spiritual genius you have failed to make of it a brotherhood. So America, I would urge you to keep your moral advances abreast with your scientific advances.

It's not quite as valuable as if it had been written in 1929, when Martin Luther King was born.

The Institute makes sure that the work we're doing to preserve the King legacy - all of the materials related to King and the civil rights movement - goes on in perpetuity.