In the words of Martin Luther King,Jr

Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole
staircase, just take the first step. --Martin Luther King Jr.

I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three
meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds,
and dignity, quality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that
what self-centered men have torn down, other-centered men can build
up. --Martin Luther King Jr

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night
have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but
we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate
to our limited vision, but we must speak. For we are deeply in need of
a new way beyond the darkness ... let us rededicate ourselves in the
long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world. --Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.

I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.
This is the interrelated structure of reality. --Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions
of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence
without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for
all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and
retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. --Martin Luther
King Jr., December 11, 1964

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the
starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace
and brotherhood can never become a reality.... I believe that unarmed
truth and unconditional love will have the final word. --Martin Luther
King, Jr.

All of life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever
affects one directly affects all indirectly --Martin Luther King

Every person must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative
altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the
judgment. Life's most persistent and urgent question is, what are you
doing for others? --Martin Luther King Jr.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as
fools. --Martin Luther King, Jr.

Imagine walking down a darkened street in the middle of a city at
night. No one is around you. As you step off a curb into an alley, you
notice across the street another man stepping off the curb also. But
as he stepped off the curb, somebody jumped from the alley and began
beating him and the man yells for help. There are two things that go
through your mind. One, if you go over and help the man, what's going
to happen to you? What we should be asking is, if I don't go over and
help that man, what's going to happen to him? --Martin Luther King Jr.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the
final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is
stronger than evil triumphant. --Martin Luther King Jr., in Nobel
Prize Acceptance Speech

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the
silence of our friends. --Martin Luther King Jr.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist
to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make
philanthropy necessary. --Martin Luther King Jr.

We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite
hope. --Martin Luther King Jr.

If you want to be important -- wonderful. If you want to be recognized
-- wonderful. If you want to be great -- wonderful. But recognize that
he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That's a new
definition of greatness.

And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that
definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because
everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve.
You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You
don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have
to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve. You don't have to
know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only
need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be
that servant. --Martin Luther King Jr.

In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both
rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is
interrelated, and all men are interdependent. --Martin Luther King Jr.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method, which rejects
revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method
is love. --Martin Luther King, Jr.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reconsider your definitions. We are prone to judge success by the
index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by
the quality of our service and relationship to mankind. --Martin
Luther King, Jr.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate
cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which
we arrive at that goal. --Martin Luther King, Jr.

Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. --Martin Luther King Jr.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful
words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of
the good people. --Martin Luther King, Jr.

2007 - The Hope of a Fresh Start - NYT editorial

January 1, 2007
Editorial

The Hope of a Fresh Start
New Year’s Day is the simplest holiday in the calendar, a Champagne cork of a day after all the effervescence of the evening before. There is no civic agenda, no liturgical content, only the sense of something ended, something begun. It is a good day to clean the ashes out of the wood stove, to consider the possibilities of next summer’s garden, to wonder how many weeks into the new year you will be before you marvel at how quickly 2007 is going. “This will be the year ...,” you find yourself thinking, but before you can finish the thought you remember what all the previous years have taught you — that there’s just no telling.

We are supposed to believe in the fresh start of a new year, and who doesn’t love the thought of it? But we are just as likely to feel the pull of the old ways on this holiday, to acknowledge the solid comfort — like it or not — of the self we happen to have become over the years. We may not say, like Charles Lamb in 1820, that we would no more alter the shape of our lives “than the incidents of some well-contrived novel.” But we know what he means.

No one has faced the prospect of New Year’s time more honestly than Lamb. He knew that its real theme was what he called “an intolerable disinclination to dying,” something he felt especially sharply in the dead of winter, awaiting the peal of bells ringing in the new year. It was an inescapable syllogism for him — New Year, the passing of time, the certainty of death.

What it forced from him was the very thing it should force from all of us — a renewal of our pleasure in life itself. “I am in love,” he wrote, “with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets.”