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The book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, I read it when I was about 17-and-a-half or 18. It changed my life.

John Lewis

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John Lewis
Age: 80 †
Born: 1940
Born: February 21
Died: 2020
Died: July 17
Chairperson
Human Rights Activist
Politician
U.S. Representative
Troy
Alabama
John Robert Lewis
Life
King
Kings
Changed
Story
Half
Read
Montgomery
Stories
Martin
Book
Luther

More quotes by John Lewis

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But you have to have hope. You have to be optimistic in order to continue to move forward.
John Lewis
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I think [Donald Trump] is going to be inaugurated this week. I have great concerns, and apparently Republicans do as well, and there's going to be an investigation about the role that Russian hacking played in getting him elected.
John Lewis
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I remember being at the church a few hours after the church was bombed in Birmingham, the 16th Street Baptist Church. It was very hard and very difficult to stand on that corner across the street from the church. Or to go Mississippi and search for the three civil rights workers who came up missing. There is a lot of trauma.
John Lewis
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I don't have any extraordinary gifts. I'm just an average Joe who grew up very poor in rural Alabama.
John Lewis
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I think that [James] Comey acted in an outrageous way during the [presidential ] campaign [in 2016].
John Lewis
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We built a coalition of conscience, and that we can do it again, and we can go forward, and help redeem the soul of America.
John Lewis
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We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us.
John Lewis
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I truly believe that one day we will get there, we will arrive. And if we do it right in America, maybe, just maybe, we can serve as a model for the rest of the world.
John Lewis
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I believe it is my obligation to tell the story of the civil rights movement to the next generation.
John Lewis
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The lessons of nonviolence are universal. Not just for America.
John Lewis
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To question the legitimacy of the next United States president, you know, and you're worried about a tweet that says, hey, why don't you get back to work instead of questioning my legitimacy? Too bad.
John Lewis
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People should organize people to just turn up and participate in the democratic process. Knock on doors. They may not be old enough to register to vote, but they can urge their teachers, their parents, their grandparents, their mothers, their fathers, and others to get out and vote.
John Lewis
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I would say to a young person: continue to study. Study what is taking place in your community, in your neighborhood, maybe at your school.
John Lewis
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The government, both state and federal, has a duty to be reasonable and accommodating.
John Lewis
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The point is not where Barack Obama was born, the point is is that we've got congressmen on the Democratic side of the aisle that are questioning the legitimacy of President-elect [Donald] Trump who won in an electoral landslide.
John Lewis
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This man [ Donald Trump] won in an electoral landslide.
John Lewis
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That's where the outrage should be, not old news, but the fact that we are preparing for the transfer of power. and we have been working with President [Barack] Obama, hand in glove, and I think that they - including the president - should step up and get his people in line and tell them to grow up and accept the fact that they lost the election.
John Lewis
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Some people know Rosa Parks, they know Daisy Bates in Arkansas, but every... Ruby Doris Smith, Diane Nash, countless individuals.
John Lewis
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Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk
John Lewis
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I would like to think that we have made much more progress, that we've come much further, to have someone like a Donald Trump to emerge as the nominee of a major political party.
John Lewis