Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - an excerpt from Beyond Vietnam

this is an excerpt from Beyond Vietnam, a speech that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York:

[John F. Kennedy] said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.