There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence. The rush and pressures of modern life are a form of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, to succumb to violence ... The frenzy of the activist ... destroys our own inner capacity for peace.

It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

—Thomas Merton

Editor's Note: Note that this was written in the 1960s, well before iPhones, the Internet, Facebook, personal computers, and the proliferation of TVs. Merton may have been underestimating the rush and pressure and "innate violence" of our age.