Barack Obama Quotes

Martin Luther King was never an up close and personal figure in the United States.

I loved Martin Luther King more than a brother.

There's never been a film with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the center released in theaters. Ever! One does not exist. You've only seen tele-films and stage plays about him. Yet, we have big screens biopics about all kinds of people. So, I think it's only right that there be a full-length feature about Dr. King. I don't think there could be enough of them, but there should be at least one. So, here it is!

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.

The legacy of [Martin Luther] King is the very thing that must be expanded if America is to be free and democratic in the 21st century. It's just as simple as that.

Anybody who takes Martin Luther King seriously has got to go beyond the standard understanding of who he was, has to connect those dots.

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

[Martin Luther] King subpoened the nation's conscience. He was killed for it.

Martin Luther King was a leader for all Americans on our own professed values.

I grew up reading Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Martin Luther King's legacy is never to be measured by bricks and mortar, but rather by the kind of lives that we live, and the kind of love and service that we render.

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 a voice to the voiceless, and he did that tirelessly, and his faith was the engine to that. But he was just a human being, at the end of the day.

Dr. [Martin Luther] King was a human being. He had a sense of humor which was wonderful.

The anniversary of the Montgomery boycott was being celebrated, and the handbill that was out, and all whatever literature that was circulated, didn't say practically anything about movement or what the movement stood for, what it had done, or anything, but was simply adulation of the leader, you know, [Martin Luther] King.

It was so crucial to the Civil Rights Movement that on June 23, 1963, Martin Luther King came to town, walked down Woodward Avenue with more than 100,000 people and delivered the first major public iteration of his "I Have A Dream" speech, two months before he did it in Washington.

I think you can find some rationales for that if we look at the background out of which he came. Martin [Luther King] had come out of a highly competitive, black, middle-class background.

His headstone said FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST But death is a slave's freedom We seek the freedom of free men And the construction of a world Where Martin Luther King could have lived and preached nonviolence.

Either Malcolm X or Martin [Luther King] could have played the role of a unifier, but it was - Malcolm as long as he remained within the Nation of Islam, talking to the converted, he did not represent a fundamental threat to the American government.

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.

His [Martin Luther King] last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, is a direct reference to angles, barbarism or socialism.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

Martin Luther King (Jr.) during the civil rights movement used to exclaim that he looked forward to heaven where he would be "Free at last." That is the inscription on his tomb in Atlanta.

I know my dear brother, President [Barack] Obama, has a bust of Martin King right there in the Oval Office, but the question is are is he going to be true to who that Martin Luther King, Jr., actually is? King was concerned about what? The poor. He was concerned about working people. He was concerned about quality jobs. He was concerned about quality housing. He was concerned about precious babies in Vietnam, the way we ought to be concerned about precious babies in Afghanistan and precious babies in Tel Aviv and precious babies in Gaza.

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.