The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose contribution is recognized by today's holiday, is best known as an icon of the civil rights movement. But King spoke out on many other issues. Here's a sample:

Military Spending

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." (1967)

Values

"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. (1964)

War

"I see this war (Vietnam) as an unjust, evil and futile war. But if I had confronted the call to military service in a war against Hi8tler, I believe that I would have temporarily sacrificed my pacifism because Hitler was such an evil force in history." (1967)

Poverty

"The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each othere because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to comsume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty." (1967)

Racial Equality

"A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once, the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared. (1967)

Hate Crime Legislation

"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important." 1962

Peace

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men." 1963

Commitment to Cause

"I submit to you that, if a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live." 1963

"We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest." (1964)

The riots of the 1960s

"A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard." (1967)

Detroit Free Press, January 21, 2008.