What we need in the United States

By David Murray, Editor, Vital Speeches of the Day

If we were to name a fifth vital speech of this week it would have been Robert F. Kennedy’s speech, delivered April 4, 1968, in Indianapolis. On the day Martin Luther King was assassinated, Kennedy told a shocked and grieving crowd (as speechwriter Cynthia Starks aptly reminds us):

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom and compassion toward one another…

And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and its people.