Martin Luther King Jr

"Everybody can be great because anybody can serve...you only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the ugly as beautiful and the beautiful as ugly and to describe the true with the false and the false with the true." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

I deeply respect people who are willing to put their back against a wall and not back down from what they believe. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther, Susan B. Anthony, Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, Jim and Elizabeth Elliot, Martin Luther King Jr -- all people I admire because of their great courage and strength of heart.

Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglas, Medgar Evers, Elizabeth Jennings...all the great civil rights leaders walked down a path that was very much like Jesus. They fought against hatred and bigotry for the cause of justice, love and equality. Situational ethics came very much into play as the question of "Who do I obey -- God or government?" was very real. And many of them died for their cause.

Martin Luther King Jr is a great holiday. We as a nation do well to stop and remember what it is he fought and died for, which in a word, is freedom. There's no more Jesus-like concept than freedom. "It is for freedom Christ set us free." I think MLK would have been great friends with George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Benjamin Franklin. They were all revolutionaries -- and, it seems to me -- he was great friends with Jesus, the greatest Revolutionary of all time.

A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr is a fantastic book.