Daniel Berrigan Quotes
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Spirituality was the main issue. Connection with God was the main issue.
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The Jesuits I know who have died and all their lives were great teachers, they're the least remembered people.
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The God of life summons us to life; more, to be lifegivers, especially toward those who lie under the heel of the powers.
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The gift we can offer others is so simple a thing as hope.
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Faith is rarely where your head is at. Nor is it where your heart is at. Faith is where your ass is at!
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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.
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No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being.
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It's not going to be easy to change things.
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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.
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I don't know a more irreligious attitude, one more utterly bankrupt of any human content, than one which permits childred to be destroyed.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Start with the impossible. Proceed calmly towards the improbable. No worry, there are at least five exits.
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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.
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The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.