William Shakespeare wrote, “Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.”

It is difficult to echo with words of a great man. All the quotes not cited below belong to one of my dearest of inspirations, Martin Luther King Jr. Here is a brief history and his incredible words I thought were appropriate.

“A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.”

Martin Luther King Jr. was a man who protested during the Vietnam war against the Vietnam war. He was arrested over 20 times in several states, beaten by police on at least four occasions, his home was bombed and he was finally assassinated by a suspicious lone gunman in 1968.

“I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.”

“They have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: ‘The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.’”

Martin Luther King Jr. was the youngest person ever at the time to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, when he was 35 years old. He would turn over the $54,123 awarded him to the furtherance of the civil rights movement. He remains the second youngest ever to win the award. He was awarded five honorary degrees during his civil rights efforts and was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963.

“When you are right, you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.”

“The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth. Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively.”