“If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.”

“Some things are worse than death... If a man lives, he must still live with himself.”

“It was like watching a community you thought you knew reveal itself as something else.”

“Anyone intent on moral clarity might want to find another book and, in fact, might not want to go anywhere near the enduring chasm of race in the United States.”

“In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.”

“Unjust social orders do no fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor, though such appeals may be an important element; history teaches us that they fall because a large enough number of people organize a movement powerful enough to push them down. Rarely do such revolutions emerge in a neat and morally pristine process.”

“In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus.”

“The Lord works through deeply flawed people, since He made so few of the other kind.”

“The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.”

“If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.”