Quotes about Civil rights

No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.

All men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.

Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...

My father's approach to the most brutal and unambiguous social injustices during the civil rights struggle was rooted in nonviolence as a morally and tactically correct response.

The majority of the Negroes who took part in the year-long boycott of Montgomery's buses were poor and untutored; but they understood the essence of the Montgomery movement. One elderly woman summed it up for the rest. When asked after several weeks of walking whether she was tired, she answered: "My feet is tired, but my soul is at rest."

Martin Luther King represents a voice, a vision, and a way... I am convinced that the whole future of America depends on how seriously we take this voice, this vision, and this way.

I've seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love.

I see an America in which Martin Luther King's dream is our national dream.

What I really feel is necessary is that the black people in this country wil have to upset this apple cart. We can no longer ignore the fact that America is not the... land of the free and the home of the brave.

We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs 'down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.'

Every red stripe in that flag represents the black man's blood that has been shed.