Quotes about Action

If you want to be prominent, get out and try for something.

Begin to see that when we say God will "justify" rather than merely "acquit," the action has a reconstituting force — hence the insufficiency of the courtroom metaphor "to acquit." God's righteousness is the same thing as his justice, and his justice is powerfully at work justifying, which does not mean excusing, passing over, or even "forgiving and forgetting," but actively making right that which is wrong.

Through fidelity, we situate ourselves and maintain ourselves in the hands of God so exactly as to become one with them in their action.

I'm not a complainer. I'm a doer. So if I see something is wrong, then I feel like I have to get in there and try to fix it.

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.

Why do you not practice what you preach.

We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.

Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly.

We all need reminders that there is a huge difference between coaching from the spiritual sidelines and putting skin in the game. Between advertising for the cause and actually joining it. Between talking about it from afar and getting close enough for it to affect our comfort.

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.

All great change in America begins at the dinner table.