Daniel Berrigan Quotes

Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.

One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better

Faith is rarely where your head is at. Nor is it where your heart is at. Faith is where your ass is at!

Of course, let us have peace, we cry, "but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties ... " There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison, and death in its wake.

Instead of building the peace by attacking injustices like starvation, disease, illiteracy, political and economic servitude, we spend a trillion dollars on war since 1946, until hatred and conflict have become the international preoccupation.

If you are going to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood.

Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children. How many must die before our voices are heard, how many must be tortured, dislocated, starved, maddened? When, at what point, will you say no to this war?

Start with the impossible. Proceed calmly towards the improbable. No worry, there are at least five exits.

The sponsors of war closely resemble the weapons they create. And smart bombs, depleted uranium, land mines, rockets and tanks, rather than protect 'widows and orphans and strangers at the gate', are designed precisely to create 'widows and orphans', to transform strangers into enemies and enemies into corpses.

But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of truth? And more urgently, how shall we do this in a bad time?

The gift we can offer others is so simple a thing as hope.

One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible.

We have one of our priests in prison right now for his antiwar actions, and three of us in the community are forbidden to visit him because we're all convicted felons.

Well, I’ve been in several films including documentaries, but the big blockbuster, I was hired as advisor to the actors, I was trying to make Jesuits out of them.

Because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total - but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.

Because success is such a weasel word anyway, it's such a horribly American word, and it's such a vamp and, I think it's a death trap.

No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being.

The God of life summons us to life; more, to be lifegivers, especially toward those who lie under the heel of the powers.

For my part, I believe that the vain, glorious and the violent will not inherit the earth. . . . In pursuance of that faith my friends and I take the hands of the dying in our hands. And some of us travel to the Pentagon, and others live in the Bowery and serve there, and others speak unpopularly and plainly of the fate of the unborn and of convicted criminals. It is all one.

You have to struggle to stay alive and be of use as long as you can.

The arms race is worse than it ever was, the dumping of creation down a military rat hole is worse than it ever was, the wars across the earth are worse than they ever were.

Every nation-state tends towards the imperial - that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top.

I don't have to prove my life. I just have to live.

The Jesuits I know who have died and all their lives were great teachers, they're the least remembered people

The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.

I don't know a more irreligious attitude, one more utterly bankrupt of any human content, than one which permits childred to be destroyed.

A revolution is interesting insofar as it avoids like the plague the plague it promised to heal.

Every nation-state tends towards the imperial - that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.

I'd like to die with my boots on.

You can't bank on the outcome.

You just have to do what you know is right.

Spirituality was the main issue. Connection with God was the main issue.

I think of my brother just out of prison again. He will have spent ten years of the last 30 in prison.

I was publishing when I was 20, 21. And it really never stopped.

Most Americans would agree that Plowshares is a Theatre of the Absurd.

There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent.

My father had very little formal education.

I never met a Jesuit before I applied for the order.

It's not going to be easy to change things.