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“Let us not forgot that Gandhi’s assassin was in a certain sense a religious man and sacrificed his freedom. If it is bravery you admire, he had bravery. If it is devotion, he had that. If it is religion that will save the world, in his way, he had religion.
“The point is: What kind of religion and what kind of loyalty? And the drama is that that struggle goes on and on. It is the drama that brings men and women out of the busy scenes of life, in crowded cities, men and women who have sought the gods of society, men and women of the breed who have produced the atomic bomb.
“We come to honor this figure, this little man, this Gandhi, this poor man, rich in the spirit, and in that honor, we admit the struggle that is unresolved within us. We aren’t following the way of Gandhi.
“We who do not live in India pray whatever gods there are that India will now seek the way of peace, that this Gandhi whose last great act was to fast in order to bring about a cessation of communal strife. He who hated partition, nevertheless hated even more the evil of mass murder.
“We say, ‘Let India now seek the way of peace. Let Gandhi triumph in death in India.’ Yes, but in varying degrees, under different historical circumstances, the struggle goes on everywhere, and neither on this platform nor in this audience are any exempt from it, nor is any nation exempt from it.
“The hope of mankind is bound up in the drama. Who knows the next act? There is not one of us here so free that we can say no to those who seek to triumph by the ways of force and hate. It is we who are the battleground. We are the warriors, and in us the struggle goes on. It is for us to be profoundly grateful that once in a great while, in many centuries of history, some Mahatma Gandhi is given to us, and it is for us to be thankful that in our weakness and in our uncertainty, in the fury of our passion, it is yet given us to admire goodness and perhaps in admiring it, to learn more and more to copy it.”
