A recording of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. giving a speech on civil disobedience entitled “But If Not” to a congregation in 1967.

A snippet:

I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.

Source: Democracy Now via Boing Boing

I love to have Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar podcast playing in the background while I’m writing blog posts, making plans for my business, or completing my weekly review.

Each podcast runs about an hour and features one well-known entrepreneur sharing stories of their personal successes and failures.

Some of my favorite speakers include Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path and Katie Rodan of ProActiv (see the 2006 Schedule for podcast links).

You can watch videos and listen to podcasts of these seminars at http://etl.stanford.edu/.