Daniel Berrigan Quotes (28 Quotes)

It seems to me that I see a clear path from, let's say this fifth to the eighth millennium, of the Common Era Before Christ and Christ.

You just have to do what you know is right.

The students go on and they scatter and then you see this great priest after 50, 55 years of teaching, and there might be 25 people at his funeral.

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

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

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

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

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.

And their conviction is that if it is done with that kind of purity it will go somewhere. I believe that with all my heart, but I'm not responsible for its going somewhere.

My father had very little formal education.

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

You can't bank on the outcome.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

It's also reflective of a young person's religion or faith in that it's highly charged with sacramental imagery and with country imagery, because I was in the seminary for so many years in the country.

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

There is no 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.

Well, I think I was always sort of reflecting where I was and my sense of surroundings and ecology, urban or country, or foreign, living in Europe, very affected by all of that.

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

I don't know what more to say. I mean, we're all going to die in a world that is worse than when we entered it.

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.

I'd like to die with my boots on.

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.

You have to sacrifice yourself. I don't want to make a big deal about it, but you have to pay your dues. I wouldn't have it any other way.