For my confirmation I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.

Movies TV sports come and go but what you stand for is what people remember. Mandela Martin Luther King John Kennedy are people who really stood for something and were willing to die for it. You don't see a whole lot of that any more.

My sense of religion is Einstein's sense of relativity. I don't believe in God. I believe that energy never dies. So the possibility exists that you might be breathing in some other form of Moses or Buddha or Muhammad or Bobby Kennedy or Roosevelt or Martin Luther King or Jesus.

Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered as our prince of peace of civil rights. We owe him something major that will keep his memory alive.

I'm hungry for knowledge. The whole thing is to learn every day to get brighter and brighter. That's what this world is about. You look at someone like Gandhi and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that's from being bright all the time and trying to be brighter.

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye ear and imagination - everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.

When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive Malcolm X was alive great great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.

I think it's a good thing for a president or political leaders to want to put their values or their faith into action. Desmond Tutu did that in South Africa. Martin Luther King Jr. did that here. This is a good thing.

My daddy Rev. A. D. King my granddaddy Martin Luther King Senior - we are a family of faith hope and love.

I'm a Christian. I go to church when I can. I was raised Baptist. I went to a Lutheran school. I'm a nondenominational practicing Christian. I have a lot of faith.

Martin Luther King Jr. didn't carry just a piece of cloth to symbolize his belief in racial equality he carried the American flag.

We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a time to honor the greatest champion of racial equality who taught a nation - through compassion and courage - about democracy nonviolence and racial justice.

What I've always said is that I'm opposed to institutional racism and I would've had I've been alive at the time I think had the courage to march with Martin Luther King to overturn institutional racism and I see no place in our society for institutional racism.

If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years which rejected it.

Each year on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth America has the opportunity to reflect on our nation's progress towards the realization of his dream.

Half a century ago the amazing courage of Rosa Parks the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.