This is how the Lorraine Hotel looked last night (January 13, 2007) at 9 pm.  

I had never been to Memphis until this weekend, so I had never before visited the Lorraine (it is now a preserved historical site).  It was eerily quiet last night, not at all the way it was at the moment the Lorraine became famous.  It was here that Martin Luther King was gunned down on April 4, 1968.  King’s second-floor room is marked with a large wreath.

The Lorraine reminded me of my visit to the site of JFK’s assassination in Dallas a few years ago.  Both sites seem too small and ordinary to be as significant as they both are.

Here are some of my favorite quotes of Martin Luther King:

• Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
• All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
• Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars… Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
• In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
• Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.
• Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
• Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
• I submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.
• Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
• I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
• All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.