Man is made or unmade by himself. By the right choice he ascends. As a being of power, intelligence, and love, and the lord of his own thoughts, he holds the key to every situation.
In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
There are four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. That’s four million solutions to the problem of staying alive.
Private passions tire and exhaust themselves, public ones never.
Humanism and Divinity are as complementary to one another in the order of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order of being.
You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into instant flame by an encounter with another human being.
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.
The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.
In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.
Who makes us ignorant? We ourselves. We put our hands over our eyes and weep that it is dark.
Man has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.