Kings quotes
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"Today President Obama is in the Middle East. He met the new king of Saudi Arabia. Obama also met Saudi Arabia's first lady, the second lady, third lady, and fourth lady."
"If King Harold had had swans on his side, England would still be Saxon."
"I think Martin Luther King would always keep track of collective insurgencies among poor and working people. He was concerned about the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union, for example. He would have closely followed the Arab Spring. And certainly he would be very critical of the massive surveillance state that has emerged in America in the last five to 10 years. He would have approved of the movements trying to gain some accountability in U.S. foreign policy, such as drones being (used) on innocent people. I think he would march against drones."
"We live in a world where people are fearful of extremism, but Martin Luther King would say he was always trying to keep the flow of love in place. In that sense, he turned the world on its head."
"Martin Luther King was not a Marxist or a communist, but his radical love leads him to put poor and working people at the center."
"I wished the president [Barack Obama] were more "Martin Luther King-like.""
"I think it's important not to view Martin Luther King Jr. in a narrow political manner. His fundamental commitment is to a radical love of humanity, and especially of poor and working people. And that radical love leads him to a radical analysis of power, domination and oppression. What's difficult is to situate him ideologically under a particular category."
"Anybody who takes Martin Luther King seriously has got to go beyond the standard understanding of who he was, has to connect those dots."
"I know my dear brother, President [Barack] Obama, has a bust of Martin King right there in the Oval Office, but the question is are is he going to be true to who that Martin Luther King, Jr., actually is? King was concerned about what? The poor. He was concerned about working people. He was concerned about quality jobs. He was concerned about quality housing. He was concerned about precious babies in Vietnam, the way we ought to be concerned about precious babies in Afghanistan and precious babies in Tel Aviv and precious babies in Gaza."
"Martin Luther King was an extremist of love."
"We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail."
"Martin Luther King was a radical democrat, by which I mean someone who is a foe of wealth inequality."
"What is accurately portrayed is the rich humanity not just of Martin Luther King but of the movement, which was a multiracial movement. You had blacks and whites coming together and sacrificing, organizing and mobilizing the world. That's the first time we've had collective action put at the center of any kind of portrayal of Martin King on the screen."
"All talks about legacies of white supremacy must be tied to empowering the lives of poor and working people as a whole. The black agenda - from Frederick Douglas to A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr, Fannie Lou Hammer to Ella Baker - has always been tied to race talk inseparable from expanding possibilities of democracy, expanding empowerment of everyday people."
"She could only write with him at night and she was wasting her days just sitting around. So he thought I could write with her during the day. And that was Carole King."
"If Martin [Luther King, Jr.]'s philosophy had been embraced and lived out in Iraq and other places, we wouldn't have bin Ladens."
"This morning President Obama met with Britain's Prince William in the Oval Office. It was a meeting between a symbolic ruler with no real power and the future king of England."
"Who built the seven gates of Thebes? In the books are listed the names of kings. Did the kings heave up the building blocks?"
"I don't know what you all believe, and I don't really care ... but you have to admit that beliefs are odd. Lots of Christians wear crosses around their necks ... you really think when Jesus comes back, he ever wants to see a fucking cross?"
"If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible."
