Martin Luther King Jr.

As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation - either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.

Source: "Suffering and Faith," Martin Luther King Jr., The Christian Century, 27 April 1960

This is from King's short essay 'Suffering and Faith,' published in The Christian Century on 27 April 1960 (vol. 77, p. 510), written after the Montgomery years. The wording here matches the published text closely; the original reads 'two ways that I could respond to my situation' and uses a colon rather than a dash, so the corpus text is a very light punctuation/wording variant of a genuine passage.

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Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

Source: "The Drum Major Instinct," sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr., 4 February 1968

From the closing movement of King's 'Drum Major Instinct' sermon, delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on 4 February 1968, two months before his assassination. The passage — 'Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve... You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love' — is well documented in the King Papers and in recordings of the sermon. The corpus rendering ('anybody can serve') is a common variant of the delivered line; the substance and sourcing are solid.

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