John Lewis Quotes

One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.

Let people have an education and you can't stop them.

The man of the millennium is much more liberated than the man of the '90s.

It is the rank and file - the average woman - for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly.

We will take up the ball of the Revolution where our fathers stopped it and roll it to the final consummation of freedom and independence for the masses.

You could not let your masters see you read; but now [after Emancipation] the colored people are fond of sending their children to school. Because the children in after years will be able to tell us ignorant ones how to do for ourselves.

Men of Color, To Arms! The case is before you. This is our golden opportunity. Let us accept it, and forever wipe out the dark reproaches unsparingly hurled against us by our enemies. Let us win for ourselves the gratitude of our country, and the best blessings of our posterity through all time.

At this moment, then, the Negroes must begin to do the very thing which they have been taught that they cannot do.

As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.

I like the fact that glass ceilings are breaking all over.

Education is freedom.

We had no more courage than Harriet Tubman or Marcus Garvey had in their times. We just had a more vulnerable enemy.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

When people discuss the 1960s and the great Civil Rights Era, they often speak in romantic terms as if there wasn't immense work put in, and as if there wasn't immense sacrifice that took place. But none of those battles were easily fought and won; there were sustained movements behind them.

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.

From seeds of his body blossomed the flower that liberated a people and touched the soul of a nation.

Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.

It is within your power at this very moment not only to consumate an act of enlightened statesmanship, but, as the instrument of the Almighty, to restore to freedom a race of men.

Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.

You supposed to be able to do anything in this world. That's what Martin Luther King told me.

For me, the fall of the Wall came at the exact right time because, I mean, I was 17, basically I hadn't missed anything, unlike the generation of my parents, who were deprived of a lot of things. They couldn't travel, and they couldn't really get ahead in their professional careers. So for me, it was perfect timing.

We have been saying "Freedom" for six years. What we are going to start saying now is "Black Power". We have begged the President. We've begged the federal government. That's all we've been doing, begging and begging. From now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell them.

Ordinary Chinese can actually make choices about their own lives which wasn’t possible 25 years ago.

No one, and no mind, was ever emancipated by merely being left alone.

The Emancipation Proclamation was fraught with consequences, immediate and remote, such as human foresight could not penetrate…..