Political Quotes

“I thank Ms. Clark for organizing this beautiful observance and testimony to our beloved colleague. I want to praise John Lewis, not the Congressman, but John Lewis the member of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a relative handful of students who began a process that transformed America forever and brought down the walls of American apartheid and Jim Crow through the extraordinary force of their physical courage, their moral courage, and their political courage to confront an entire system of racism bearing down upon them. The end of their struggle was nonviolence, to create a nonviolent society committed to justice and equality for everyone, and the means of arriving at that nonviolent society was nonviolence itself. So even as the sheriffs and police officers unleashed the German shepherds and the billy clubs on them, the water hoses and the teargas, they still remained remarkably nonviolent the entire way there. I asked John Lewis when we got to travel down South on the civil rights tour with the Faith and Politics Institute about where he thought things were. I think he felt that, in terms of civil rights, we have been moving things forward, but in terms of violence, we still had not remotely turned the corner. I said, what is going to make the difference? He said: When people realize that violence doesn't work. Leaving aside the morality of it, violence doesn't work. We talked about the Vietnam war. We talked about the Iraq war.…”