For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills... Yet many of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man

The greatest truth must be recognition that in every man, in every child is the potential for greatness.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

We can master change not though force or fear, but only though the free work of an understanding mind, though an openness to new knowledge and fresh outlooks, which can only strengthen the most fragile and most powerful of human gifts: the gift of reason.

We in Government have begun to recognize the critical work which must be done at all levels-local, State and Federal-in ending the pollution of our waters.

Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.