We have come to depend obsessively on an enormous capability of violence — for security, for national self-esteem, even for economic stability.

Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist

Speech (1968-02-10), “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam,” Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft, University of Kentucky
    (Source)

Collected in The Long-Legged House, Part 2 (1969).