Martin Luther King Jr. quotes

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 50 years ago -- on April 4, 1968 -- in Memphis, Tennessee.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 50 years ago -- on April 4, 1968 -- in Memphis, Tennessee.

Here are some of the most memorable quotes of the US civil rights leader known for his soaring rhetoric:

On racism

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

August 23, 1968 at the "March on Washington"

On the Vietnam War

"I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love."

April 30, 1967, Riverside Church, New York

On his legacy

"Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter."

February 4, 1968, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands in moments of challenge and controversy."

King's 1963 book "Strength to Love"

On good and evil

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

December 10, 1964, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, Norway

His final speech

"Well, I don't know what will happen now; we've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."


April 3, 1968, Bishop Charles Mason Temple, Memphis, Tennessee

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Martin Luther King Jr: the dream, the man, the legacy

Towards the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. lamented that his dream had "turned into a nightmare."

The US civil rights leader was a weary man when he was cut down by an assassin's bullet at the age of 39 on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968.

He was also a controversial man -- unlike the iconic figure celebrated today with a national holiday and an imposing granite memorial in Washington.

"He's become frozen in time -- not as the man he was in 1968, but in the image of August 1963 when he gives the 'I Have a Dream' speech," said David Farber, a history professor at the University of Kansas.

"It's easy for Americans to forget how polarizing a figure King actually was in the 1960s," Farber said.

"He'd become a really radical figure in the United States -- an outspoken opponent of American foreign policy, demanding that justice extend not just to African-Americans but to all poor Americans."


A seminal moment came in April 1967, when King made a speech in New York opposing the war in Vietnam, where more than 11,000 US troops were to die that year.

"King raised the ire of the entire civil rights movement and of government and much of the political structure when he came out against the Vietnam War," said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Buffalo.

David Garrow, author of "Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference," said opposition to the war was seen as "fringe" at the time, and anti-war sentiment was "not widely popular like it is, say, come 1972."

'Beyond civil rights'

At the time of his murder by James Earl Ray, a white drifter with racist leanings, King had also been living for years under the constant surveillance of the FBI, which had dubbed him the "most dangerous" man in America.


And his unwavering defense of non-violence as the way to bring about change was facing a challenge from a younger, impatient generation of militant black youth.

"The final 12 months of his life, King is so exhausted, so pessimistic about the future, so depressed," Garrow said. "A dozen or more times in his final two years, he says 'The dream I had in Washington in 1963 has turned into a nightmare.'"

"One of the things we miss about King is how hard it was to do the work he's doing, the toll it takes," said Jeanne Theoharis, a political science professor at CUNY's Brooklyn College.

"How much hate, how much opposition he's facing, and how some of that is in the form of horrible violence," said Theoharis, author of "A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History."

Fifty years after his death, the vision of racial equality that King outlined on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial remains elusive.

Jason Sokol, a history professor at the University of New Hampshire, said there have been some advances for African-Americans over the years, culminating in the 2008 election of Barack Obama, American's first black president.

But racial inequalities persist, "especially when you look at black poverty, the black incarceration rate and the issue of police brutality," said Sokol, author of "The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr."

Taylor, the University of Buffalo professor, stressed that by the time of his death, King's ambitions had gone "beyond civil rights to embrace human rights."


"King's dream was anchored around imagining another possible world based on economic, social, political and racial justice -- things related to a good education, decent and affordable housing, good jobs with a living wage, quality and accessible health care," he said.

"So when we add flesh to King's dream, we realize that we haven't really made much progress over the last 50 years in the realization of that dream," he said.

"While certainly there have been changes in the racial attitudes of individuals, the racism that is embedded in institutions and in structures in the United States has not changed much at all."

King's legacy

At the same time, King's legacy looms large in myriad ways.

"King said in his Nobel Prize lecture in 1964 that the Freedom Movement was spreading the widest liberation in human history," said Taylor Branch, author of "America in the King Years," a trilogy about King's life and the civil rights era.

"He was referring to worldwide and not just for black people," said Branch, an executive producer of the documentary "King in the Wilderness" which airs on HBO on Monday.

"In many respects it has succeeded beyond his imagination," Branch said.

"I don't think -- at a time when homosexual behavior was not talked about but was even criminal -- he would have dreamed we would have marriage equality," Branch said. "Or a black president. Or all the gains that have been accrued for women."

King's legacy can also be seen in the Black Lives Matter campaign against police violence and other movements for social justice, Taylor said.


"Most recently you saw it in the 'March for Our Lives' in which millions of kids all over the country took to the streets," he said.

"I'm extremely optimistic that out there we're seeing a new generation of folks in this country who are resurrecting the notion of King's dream," he said.

One of those kids at the March for Our Lives was King's nine-year-old granddaughter Yolanda Renee, who galvanized the crowd by recalling his most famous words.


"I have a dream that enough is enough," she said. "And that this should be a gun-free world, period."

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Spielberg revisits 1980s heyday in 'Ready Player One'

He tugged at heartstrings with "E.T." and "War Horse," played on our deepest fears in "Jaws" and amped up the Cold War paranoia in "Bridge of Spies."

Now Steven Spielberg is returning to his favorite target -- the adrenal gland -- with the release of "Ready Player One," a high-octane love letter to the thrilling family films of the 1980s that made his fame.

Starring Tye Sheridan, the movie is based on a 2011 novel about a teenager on a treasure hunt in a virtual reality game, in a world torn apart by an energy crisis.

Sheridan plays teenage gamer Wade Watts, who finds himself inside an addictive virtual reality world called Oasis in the year 2045.

Hoping to escape the squalor of his trailer park in a futuristic Columbus, Ohio, Wade puts on the Oasis headset and gloves and is transported into the body of an avatar named Parzival.

Within the program he discovers clues to a game embedded by its mysterious creator, played by Oscar-winner Mark Rylance, that promises the winner full ownership of the Oasis.

The all-star support cast also features Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, T.J. Miller and Simon Pegg, who told AFP at the world premiere in Hollywood on Monday that shooting the movie felt like experiencing the future.

"We had a VR set that we could go into. We could put the mask on and actually have a look at the set that we were gonna be in," he said.

"Because you know, when you're in the grey room, you're like 'what am I looking at?' so we could have a little look at it before we start acting, which was a real treat."

'You can do anything'

In the world of Oasis, Wade encounters 1980s pop culture icons such as Freddy Krueger and the Iron Giant, and gets to race the DeLorean from "Back to the Future" as he weaves to avoid huge wrecking balls.

King Kong, R2-D2, the Joker and Mechagodzilla all get screen time while the classic 1960s Batmobile whizzes through the streets -- and there is even a glimpse of the Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" (1980).

"I was born in 2025, but I wish I'd grown up in the 1980s, like all my heroes," Wade says in voiceover.

Spielberg told the Comic-Con crowd in San Diego, where the movie was previewed last year, that the source novel by Ernie Cline was "the most amazing flash-forward and flashback at the same time about a decade I was very involved in -- the 1980s."

The veteran filmmaker said he had relished directing a sci-fi feature about the dystopian world people would be living in almost 30 years in the future.

"People are leaving the country and all of a sudden virtual reality gives you a choice, gives you another world to exist in," he said.

"And you can do anything in that world -- anything you can possibly imagine."

Spielberg actually cut most of the novel's references to his own movies, but this hasn't stopped critics suggesting that the big-screen "Ready Player One" is a kind of cinematic autobiography.

'Sweetly nostalgic'

The critics have been mainly positive, yielding a 79 percent "fresh" rating from more than 200 reviews collated by Rotten Tomatoes, which described it as "a sweetly nostalgic thrill ride" that played to Spielberg's strengths.

Not everyone is on board, of course. The Chicago Reader described the sci-fi epic as an empty "special-effects maelstrom" in which a taciturn Sheridan is in constant danger of "being out-acted by his own avatar."

Wednesday preview screenings gave the production, scripted by Cline with Zak Penn ("The Avengers"), its first $3.8 million, and it is expected to come out of the four-day Easter weekend atop the domestic box office with $45-$50 million.

Penn remembers the 1980s as a decade of technological breakthroughs in the arts, pointing to the Walkman personal stereo, video consoles and the advent of the personal computer in people's homes.

"And also films: the move towards blockbusters... really changed the way people went to the movies," he told AFP.

"I think a lot of stuff happened in those 10 years that really has had some lasting impact."

Universal's "Pacific Rim Uprising," Marvel's "Black Panther" and Lionsgate's "I Can Only Imagine" are expected to vie for second place over the holiday weekend.


The also-rans will include Lionsgate thriller "Tyler Perry's Acrimony" -- starring Taraji P. Henson as a vengeful wife -- and Pure Flix's "God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness."

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How to make Google Home play music through a Bluetooth speaker

Google has rolled out a new feature to its Google Home lineup that allows you it to play music on other Bluetooth speakers in your house.

The features: which works on Google’s Home, Home Max, and Home Mini speakers, is particularly useful if you own the Home Mini. It's an affordable, compact speaker that supports Google Assistant and can process your commands, but it's not ideal for playing music since it's so tiny. But now, thanks to his update, you can essentially amp up the sound by connecting it to another Bluetooth speaker.

“Any of your Google Home devices can connect to other Bluetooth speakers so you can control your entertainment experience simply using the sound of your voice," Google explained. You can even add multiple Bluetooth speakers to Google Home groups for multi-room audio.

Here's what you need to know.

What are Google Home, Home Max, and Home Mini and what can they do?

How to make any Google Home device play music through a Bluetooth speaker

Pair and connect a Bluetooth speaker and Google Home
Pair and connect a Bluetooth speaker and Google Home
First, pair your Bluetooth speaker with your Google Home. You need to open the Google Home app on your mobile device, then head to device settings, and follow the instructions to make it your default speaker.

Turn on your Bluetooth speaker and make sure it’s in pairing mode (press the pairing button on your speaker, if possible).

• Open the Google Home app.
• In the top right corner of the app's Home screen, tap Devices.
• Find the Google Home you want to pair with a Bluetooth speaker.
• In the top right corner, tap the device card menu (three vertical dots).
• Then, go to Settings > Default music speaker > Pair Bluetooth speaker.
• Tap the speaker you want to pair.
• Tap Done.

Ask Assistant to play music

Now, you can say things like, “Hey Google, shuffle my date night playlist” or “Hey Google, turn down the volume.” The music should automatically play on your Bluetooth speaker - without you having to tell Google the name of the device. You’ll still need to talk to your Google Home device, rather than your Bluetooth speakers, to ask Assistant questions, getting weather updates, and using other commands.

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Pyongyang Style? Seoul 'push' for Psy to play N. Korea

Seoul is pushing for "Gangnam Style" star Psy to perform in next week's historic concerts by South Korean artists in the North's capital, multiple reports said. 

Psy has in the past stripped topless on stage in the South and his lyrics include Korean swearwords (GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP)

Seoul is pushing for "Gangnam Style" star Psy to perform in next week's historic concerts by South Korean artists in the North's capital, multiple reports said.

A team of at least nine South Korean pop acts are set to visit North Korea next week for two concerts in Pyongyang, the first of their kind for more than a decade.

The shows -- part of reconciliatory moves ahead of a planned inter-Korean summit in April -- feature many top stars including K-pop girlband Red Velvet.

But Seoul is also seeking to include Psy in the lineup, South Korean media reports said, citing sources in the government and the K-pop industry.

The 40-year-old rapper/singer became an international sensation in 2012 when his wacky but catchy "Gangnam Style" music video went viral on Youtube, pushing him into global stardom.

The song satirised the lifestyle of the wealthy denizens of Gangnam in Seoul, the South's richest district, and the video has been viewed more than 3 billion times, spawning a host of imitations.

"We have formally proposed to the North to add Psy to the lineup," Seoul's MBC TV station late Sunday quoted a Seoul government official as saying.

But Pyongyang opposed the idea, it said, adding the conservative North was apparently concerned about the singer's provocative performance style.

Psy has in the past stripped topless on stage in the South and his lyrics include Korean swearwords, while spectators at shows by the North's popular Moranbong band remain firmly seated throughout.

The K-pop gigs are part of a cross-border deal made earlier this month when Seoul envoys met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to pave the way for dialogue after months of tensions on the flashpoint peninsula.

Kim offered to meet South Korean President Moon Jae-in before having a face-to-face summit with US President Donald Trump, the envoys said, and Trump agreed to the rendezvous.

North Korea has not officially confirmed or denied the proposed summits.

The South's TV dramas and pop songs have taken Asia by storm and despite not being broadcast in the isolated North are known to enjoy growing popularity thanks to flash drives smuggled across the border with China.

The authoritarian nation harshly punishes those who possess or view outside cultural material unsanctioned by the state, with offenders facing potential jail terms.

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