Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.
-Ghandi
On some positions cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. 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. What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. We are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. This way of settling differences is not just. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as one who loves America. To the leaders of our own nation, the great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate in to the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love... Don't let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with justice and it seems I can hear God saying to America "you are too arrogant, and if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I will place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God. Men will beat their swords into plowshafts and their spears into pruning hooks, and nations shall not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore." I don't know about you, I ain't going to study war anymore.
Friday, June 3, 2011 at 01:49AM
Reader Comments (1)
GREAT quotes Aaron!! If only people could live by these words....