Neither the State, Nor the Organization

“I am convinced now, as I was then, that man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as a means to the end of the state, but always as an end within himself.”

(Martin Luther King, Jr. in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume IV: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957-December 1958. Susan Carson, Adrienne Clay, Kieran Taylor, and Virginia Shadron, eds. University of California Press, 2000)