I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago:
"Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem:
it merely creates new and more complicated ones."
As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am
living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak
– nothing passive – nothing naïve – in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.
In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles
carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in
war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of
human suffering, political turmoil, and spiritual disillusionment.
Therefore, I venture to suggest to all of you and all who hear and may eventually read
these words, that the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence become immediately
a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human
conflict, by no means excluding the relations between nations. It is, after all,
nation-states which make war, which have produced the weapons which threaten the
survival of mankind, and which are both genocidal and suicidal in character.
Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 10 December 1964
"The Quest for Peace and Justice".
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-lecture.html