Political Quotes

“yesterday would have been John Lewis's 81st birthday. That a fearless young man, who was threatened, jailed, beaten half to death so many times for the cause of love and justice, actually lived to reach the age of 80 seems like a miracle. Now, as America celebrates our first Black History Month since his passing, we miss him, but we still have the moral force of his message. John made sure of that. Two days before he died, he wrote an essay for the New York Times. He asked the paper to print his words on the day of his funeral--of his ``homegoing,'' as he said. It was his last message to America. In his essay John Lewis recalled how, when he was a little boy in Alabama, the threat of White supremacist violence and government- sanctioned terror was a fact of everyday life. He also remembered the moment that changed his life: hearing a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., on the radio. From Dr. King's sermons he learned about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He also learned that when we tolerate injustice, we are complicit. When we see something that is wrong, he wrote, ``each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out.'' John Lewis spent the next 65 years on Earth following Dr. King's teachings. I never met anyone in my life so unshakably committed to nonviolence and the transformative power of love.…”