That the FBI — the agency that saw King and the civil rights movement as a communist plot, subjected him to merciless surveillance and may have tried to get him to commit suicide — should, 50-plus years after his murder, purport to honor him was simply too much

One thing that becomes clear to me when I wander into the world, and the minds, of geopolitical professionals — government people — is how limited and linear their thinking seems to be

Can we envision a world in which bombing Libya or Iraq is as unimaginable as bombing Iowa?

The armed elimination of one’s problems, whether pure Hollywood fantasy or real-world geopolitics, is a settled addiction, accepted, even by those who recognize it as insane, as “the way things are.”

So what we have right now is a world in which the public’s natural desire for peace is diverted to the status of impossible

Impeaching Trump would . . get rid of Trump, or at least begin the process to do so. That’s about it. The rest of our problems would remain in place.

This is the possibility of transformation. We’ll either live together or we’ll die together

If we want to survive, by which I mean transcend, the global crises we face today, we must grasp the planet, and each other, with compassion — the altruism in our DNA — rather than bureaucratic caution and cold concern for the ruling interests

How is nonviolence more powerful than the weapons of war? It may not appear to be the case in the moment, but in the long run, the weapon-wielders lose. The opposite of nonviolence isn’t violence. The opposite is ignorance

“The reason we should be worried about rampages . . . is because they are surface indicators of highly troubling negative trends working their way through deep levels of our society.”