Our Lives Begin To End The

This line is widely attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. but is more accurately a paraphrase of a passage from his March 8, 1965 sermon in Selma, Alabama — delivered the day after "Bloody Sunday," when civil rights marchers were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. King's actual words were: "A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right… He died when he refused to stand up for justice." The shorter, sharper formulation circulates without a documented primary source.