Quotes about Action

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Why do you not practice what you preach.

We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.

Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly.

We all need reminders that there is a huge difference between coaching from the spiritual sidelines and putting skin in the game. Between advertising for the cause and actually joining it. Between talking about it from afar and getting close enough for it to affect our comfort.

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.

I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.

The past is what the present is doing now.

If anything is to be done, one must try to introduce Christianity into Christendom.

For my part I can in a way understand Abraham, but at the same time I apprehend that I have not the courage to speak, and still less to act as he did — but by this I do not by any means intend to say that what he did was insignificant, for on the contrary it is the one only marvel.