Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at Riverside Church, New York, 4 April 1967:
A few years ago there was a shining moment… a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.
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A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.