Across That Bridge Quotes

“We think of ourselves as more enlightened, more developed than the “primitive” peoples our civilizations have supplanted, yet in all our advancement, we are responsible for more death, more suffering, more murder and mayhem than any period in recorded history.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.” —BUDDHA”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part. And if we believe in the change we seek, then it is easy to commit to doing all we can, because the responsibility is ours alone to build a better society and a more peaceful world.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“No government, no multinational corporation, no agency at all could counter the mandates of a unified world community. And that is why so much energy and resources are invested in division and separation.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” —NELSON MANDELA”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“It is the responsibility, yet the individual choice, of each of us to use the light we have to dispel the work of darkness, because if we do not, then the power of falsehood rises. Through our inaction it becomes stronger, and a more potent force. It can even lead to the dimming of the light of all humanity born on this planet.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Each and every one of us has the power to turn our enemies around because we are all a spark of the divine. It does not matter whether we are fit or weak, short and scrawny, or big and strong. There is no adversary who can defeat us if we believe in our own inner capacity to overcome. Sometimes we have to gain tools to overcome our adversaries. We might need to study, to get help, to pray, or develop a plan, but there is no obstacle we as human beings cannot overcome.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Informed activism requires reading the newspaper, tracking bills through the Library of Congress’s THOMAS website, and watching legislative debates on C-SPAN. It also means learning which legislators on all levels sit on committees that affect your issue.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“We were very aware that our civility demonstrated above all the absurdity of brutalizing peaceful, law-abiding citizens and detaining them from exercising their constitutional rights.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“It is only through examining history that you become aware of where you stand”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society. The work of love, peace, and justice will always be necessary, until their realism and their imperative takes hold of our imagination, crowds out any dream of hatred or revenge, and fills up our existence with their power.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“It takes courage to admit that we participate in killing, violence, and hate around the world. And once you face the truth, it is difficult to retreat back into a state of unconsciousness. Becoming aware of the truth requires action, and that is when the struggle begins.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“America, a nation destined for greatness but tarnished by a persistent, nagging untruth”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“We have a “fast-food mentality” that expects an instant return on our investment of time, attention, and effort, a return that is concrete and clear. We are so comfortable charging forward and succeeding through our aggression and innovation that the idea of patience can seem contrary to our instincts.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Faith, to me, is knowing in the solid core of your soul that the work is already done, even as an idea is being conceived in your mind. It is being as sure as you are about your dreams as you are about anything you know as a hard fact.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society. The work of love, peace, and justice will always be necessary, until their realism and their imperative takes hold of our imagination, crowds out any dream of hatred or revenge, and fills up our existence with their power.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Nothing can stop the power of a committed and determined people to make a difference in our society. Why? Because human beings are the most dynamic link to the divine on this planet. Governments and corporations do not live. They have no power, no capacity in and of themselves. They are given life and derive all their authority from their ability to assist, benefit, and transform the lives of the people they touch. All authority emanates from the consent of the governed and the satisfaction of the customer.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“What is the purpose of a nation if not to empower human beings to live better together than they could individually? When government fails to meet the basic needs of humanity for food, shelter, clothing, and even more important—the room to grow and evolve—the people will begin to rely on one another, to pool their resources and rise above the artificial limitations of tradition or law. Each of us has something significant to contribute to society be it physical, material, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Governments and corporations do not live. They have no power, no capacity in and of themselves. They are given life and derive all their authority from their ability to assist, benefit, and transform the lives of the people they touch. All authority emanates from the consent of the governed and the satisfaction of the customer.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“We no longer dwell in that daydream. We were shaken to realism by the harshness of what we have witnessed in the last few years—the vilification of President Obama, a drive to wreck his legacy and undo the progress we have made as a nation in the last hundred years, a disdain for the sick and the poor, militarization of the police, and the weaponizing of government not to serve as an advocate, but as an agent of oppression and compliance.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“There is still much more work to do. One movement will never offer all the growth humanity needs to experience. To expect so is to build your hopes on a puff of smoke, on a whispered breath; it is to anticipate an illusion.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“I believed innocently and profoundly as a child that the world could be a better place.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Lynching and vigilantism were considered duties, the necessary protection of men who were guarding the sanctity of social boundaries and the “purity” of their lineage. No matter the rationale, these ideas put a virtuous face on centuries of brutal history that actually robbed our aggressors of their moral grounding and made them creative participants in violence.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“President Eisenhower warned us decades ago against feeding the enormous appetite of the military industrial complex. And since that time we have disregarded the admonition of a president and a general and proceeded to revolve our entire economy around the industries of”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Soul force is the ability to counter the forces of injustice with fearlessness, knowing that your soul is connected to the greatest force in the universe. Threats, violence, and aggression are simply tools that are used to make us doubt our capacity to overcome.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Martin Luther King Jr. was much more than a dreamer. He believed that faith had no meaning unless it had the power to resolve the problems of our daily lives.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“If we are truly to learn the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement, the Holocaust, or the conflict in Northern Ireland, we must concede that discomfort breeds dislike, dislike breeds disdain, disdain breeds contempt, and contempt breeds hate.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“Despite everything that has happened, regardless of the pain of their loss, despite all the other nonviolent peaceful warriors who suffered and sometimes fell, I have never once considered giving up or giving out. I could not let myself get lost in a sea of despair, because I had faith that the truth is bigger than all humanity. The tragedy of their loss was a crisis of faith, but in that struggle I discovered that you can kill a Medgar Evers or a Jimmie Lee Jackson. You can kill three civil rights workers named Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. You can bomb four innocent little girls in church on a Sunday morning. You can even kill three of the finest leaders of the twentieth century, but you cannot kill the truth they represented. The truth marches on; it is not connected to the life of any one individual. When a person dies, the dream does not die. You can kill a man, but the truth that he stood for will never die.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

“He graduated from Morehouse at nineteen, and by the time he was twenty-three years old he held a doctorate in divinity from Boston College and a degree in divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary. He never forgot his purpose or his people in his work, and he used the mandates of graduate research to begin developing his own brand of social gospel. In his quest, he made it a point to study the work of all the major theologians and philosophers who might have had any bearing on his thesis. He also branched out beyond his comfort zone, as any credible scholar would, to study influential ideas of the time that were antithetical to his beliefs, like the work of Marx, Lenin, and Nietzsche. He examined every possible angle to find the theological answers to the questions he was asking, and he emerged in his study as a notable student and a compelling scholar.”
― John Lewis, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change