Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” 

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

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If you are neutral in situations of injustice, 

you have chosen the side of the oppressor. 

~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu

 In our time, when high technology guided by values such as 

conquest, exploitation, and domination threaten our very survival, 

we need economics driven by an ethos of caring. 

We need a caring revolution. 

~ Riane Eisler

War and peace start in the human heart - and whether that heart 
is open or whether that heart closes has global implications. 
~ Pema Chodron