Everybody Can Be Great, Because Everybody Can Serve
My favorite quote from Martin Luther King Jr., the passage it comes from, and what it has meant to me.
This is one of my favorite quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.”
- Where it comes from
- The full passage
- Everybody, everyone or anybody?
- What it means to me
- Share the quote
Where the quote comes from
This quote comes from one of his final speeches, two months before he was killed. Dr. King preached it on February 4, 1968, at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, in a sermon called The Drum Major Instinct. The sermon is about the urge in all of us to be out front, to lead the parade, and the one healthy thing to do with that urge: point it at serving other people. Two months later, at his funeral in that same church, a recording of this sermon was played.
The full text and the audio live at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford, and they are worth every minute.
The full passage
Here is the passage the quote comes from (thank you, King Institute at Stanford):
“If you want to be important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That’s a new definition of greatness. By giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.” Martin Luther King Jr., “The Drum Major Instinct,” Ebenezer Baptist Church, February 4, 1968. Text courtesy of the King Institute at Stanford.
Everybody, everyone, or anybody?
You will see this quote in a few forms: “everyone can be great because everyone can serve,” or “because anybody can serve.” In the recording and in the King Institute’s transcript it is everybody, both times. And the sentence before it matters as much as the quote itself: “That’s a new definition of greatness.” Greatness, in Dr. King’s definition, is not something a few people have. It is something everybody can do, today, with whatever they have.
What it means to me
During our Everyday Humanitarians conference, this wonderful quote came up twice. First Matt Tenney talked about this idea and how it led him to title his book Serve to Be Great. It was his greatest learning between the prison, the monastery and the boardroom.
Mozart Guerrier talked about it being something central to his life and his work as a social worker. Personally I’ve found the quote to be huge in my daily reflections on what I am doing. All of us can be great. All of us can serve.
Wherever you are and whatever you may be doing, I love that this “new definition of greatness” that Dr. King gives us is available to each of us every moment.
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