You go ahead. I'd rather not be shot out of a tube into a pool filled with a bunch of nine-year-olds' urine.
. . . the constructive power of an image is not measured in terms of its truth, but of the love it inspires.
Our minorities alone are in a position to know what the fathers of our democracy were talking about.
Serviceis love in action, love "made flesh"; service is the body, the incarnation of love. Love is the impetus, service the act, and creativity the result with many by-products.
To grow is sometimes to hurt, but who would return to smallness?
. . . in 1950 a very large slice of the white South stood at the crossroads in its attitude toward its colored citizens and [was] psychologically capable of turning either way.
. . . one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance. . . I now realize that this feeling inevitably takes possession of one in the bitter struggle for equality. Indeed, I share it. Yet I wonder how we can expect total acceptance to step full grown from the womb of prejudice, with no embryo or infancy or childhood stages.
Nobody's perfect. Everyone slides here and there, and they have their ups and downs. When they are down, that is not the time to step all over them.
Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized. . . That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.
(While accepting the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award) I've been thinking about why you have to get famous to get an award for helping other people. . . If your name is John Doe, and you work night and day doing things for your helpless neighbors, what you get for your effort is tired. So, Mr. and Mrs. Doe, and all of you who give of yourselves, to those who carry too big a burden to make it on their own, I want you to reach out and take your share of this. . . Because if I have earned it, so too have you.
The greatest of wealth is the richness of the soul.