Author: joelwitwer
A feeling of divine calling, whether actual or not, allows a man to attack even the most mundane tasks with rigor and passion.
MLK Jr. on Non-Violence in “Why We Can’t Wait”
“Like their predecessors, the Negro was willing to risk martyrdom in order to move and stir the social conscience of his community and the nation. Instead of submitting to surreptitious cruelty in thousands of dark jail cells and on countless shadowed street corners, he would force his oppressor to commit his brutality openly – in the light of day – with the rest of the world looking on.” p.31
“(Non-violence) enabled him to transmute hatred into constructive energy.” p.32
“(Militant extremists) cannot solve the problem because they seek to overcome a negative situation with negative means.” p.37
“Nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek … It is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.” p.110
“Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And be bad now reached a day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.” p.191
Who am I to say whether the LORD gives us a specific calling or we are free to choose our own destinies? All I know is that I have followed my passions and everything I have done has prepared me perfectly for what I am doing.
“When suddenly (a man) turns upon you and says ‘Punish me. I do not deserve it. But because I do not deserve it, I will accept it so that the world will know hat I am right and you are wrong,’ you hardly know what to do. You feel defeated and secretly ashamed. You know that this man is as good a man as you are; that from some mysterious source he has found the courage and the conviction to meet physical force with soul force.”
– Martin Luther King Jr. in Why We Can’t Wait
Snaps from Zambia II
“All that’s truly documented from time immemorial is that man continues to kill without needing the meat of his quarry; he lies in order to avoid accountability or, conversely, to seize the reins of accountability to the point where the social contact between the government and the governed is his alone to write; he seeks endlessly to enrich himself at the expense of the public will, and while he’s at it tries all too frequently to turn his personal morality or religion into everyone else’s legality or religiosity, no quarter to the unbelievers of pariahdom.”
– Robert Ludlum in the introduction of Trevayne
Turkey Alwan Travels