Bill Ayers Quotes

I think if people really read Martin Luther King, Jr., then they would begin to understand what he really represented. The philosophy that he developed, of course, he was greatly influenced by Gandhi and Jesus Christ.

Martin Luther King was only an activist for 13 years and every year he changed and every year he became more radical. By the end he was calling for revolution. People don't know this because they go to too many prayer breakfasts on his birthday.

I grew up reading Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

I think what a lot of people don't realize is how much being the leader of this movement weighed upon him. After all, he [Dr. Martin Luter King] was only 39 years-old when he was assassinated, and only 36 during the Selma campaign. He always seemed older than he actually was, and I believe part of that had to do with just how much life he had to live in order to lead this movement.

We live in a world where people are fearful of extremism, but Martin Luther King would say he was always trying to keep the flow of love in place. In that sense, he turned the world on its head.

It is our hope that when people read "March" - Book One, Book Two, and Book Three - that they will understand that another generation of people, especially young people, were deeply inspired by the work of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and many others.

When that devil's bullet lodged itself inside the body of Martin Luther King, he had already begun an astonishing mobilization of poor, Black, white, latino Americans who had nothing to lose. They would challenge our government to eliminate exploitative, merciless, and war-mongering policies, nationwide, or else "tie up the country" through "means of civil disobedience." Dr. King intended to organize those legions into "coercive direct actions" that would make of Babylon a dysfunctional behemoth begging for relief. Is it any wonder he was killed?

[Martin Luther King] King was a socialist and King was an activist who was really a radical by the end.

I wished the president [Barack Obama] were more "Martin Luther King-like."

The goal of Martin Luther King is to get the Negroes to forgive the people the people who have brutalized them for four hundred years, by lulling them to sleep and making them forget what those whites have done to them, but the masses of black people today don't go for what Martin Luther King is putting down.

I have to pinch myself sometimes. It's unbelievable, but it's not. Because I know that this would not be happening if it hadn't been for Dr. Martin Luther King.

The book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, I read it when I was about 17-and-a-half or 18. It changed my life.

That's where Dr. [Martin Luther] King is mixed up. His goals should be the solution of the problem of the black man in America.

Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement, not replace, the progress of change. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

A decade passed between King's assassination and my birth, but the older I get, the more acutely aware I become that 10 years is nothing.

Abraham Lincoln freed the black man. In many ways, Dr. King freed the white man. How did he accomplish this tremendous feat? Where others - white and black - preached hatred, he taught the principles of love and nonviolence.

I want to play Martin Luther King. That is absolutely a role and a character who is important to the landscape of the world that I really want to play.

I loved Martin Luther King more than a brother.

The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.

I remember back in the 1960s - late '50s, really - reading a comic book called 'Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Story.' Fourteen pages. It sold for 10 cents. And this little book inspired me to attend non-violence workshops, to study about Gandhi, about Thoreau, to study Martin Luther King, Jr., to study civil disobedience.

My black hero is and always will be Martin Luther King, not just because of the strength of his oratory but because his vision was very much the reality that I'd come to take for granted.

While nothing is perfect or complete in the battle for civil rights, the efforts of Dr. King and those like him have in fact, changed the country and the world for the better in noticeable ways. His vision has made the world a more equal place, and if not equal, it has helped to ensure that minorities have a voice.

My work has always been rooted in nonviolence, as espoused by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

10 years ago the black man knew what his condition was. And today, because of the world revolution that's taking place all over this earth, the black man would be fighting for what he knows is his by right, but the movement on the part of [Martin Luther] King and the others had done nothing but slow down the militancy that is inherent in the nature of the black man.