Top 54 Berrigan Quotes
#1. Again, although I'm not a particularly religious person, I go back to the religious left that I come out of: There are moral imperatives to fight back. As Daniel Berrigan says, "We're called to do the good." And then we have to let it go. It's not our job to know where the good goes.
Chris Hedges
#2. The Pentagon is, admissibly, the most powerful institution in history.
Philip Berrigan
#3. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#5. Herein lies a riddle: How can a people so gifted by God become so seduced by naked power, so greedy for money, so addicted to violence, so slavish before mediocre and treacherous leadership, so paranoid, deluded, lunatic?
Philip Berrigan
#6. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#7. Start with the impossible. Proceed calmly towards the improbable. No worry, there are at least five exits.
Daniel Berrigan
#8. I don't know a more irreligious attitude, one more utterly bankrupt of any human content, than one which permits childred to be destroyed.
Daniel Berrigan
#9. 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?
Daniel Berrigan
#10. The poor tell us who we are, the prophets tell us who we could be, so we hide the poor, and kill the prophets.
Philip Berrigan
#11. The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.
Daniel Berrigan
#12. Faith is rarely where your head is at. Nor is it where your heart is at. Faith is where your ass is at!
Daniel Berrigan
#14. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#15. The God of life summons us to life; more, to be lifegivers, especially toward those who lie under the heel of the powers.
Daniel Berrigan
#16. If you are going to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood.
Daniel Berrigan
#17. If you dissent without breaking the law then you are legitimizing the system that allows this kind of latitude. You have to break the law to touch the state.
Philip Berrigan
#18. Lying and war are always associated. Listen closely when you hear a war-maker try to defend his current war: If he moves his lips he's lying.
Philip Berrigan
#20. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#23. We Christians forget (if we ever learned) that attempts to redress real or imagined injustice by violent means are merely another exercise in denial - denial of God and her nonviolence towards us, denial of love of neighbor, denial of laws essential to our being.
Philip Berrigan
#24. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#25. A revolution is interesting insofar as it avoids like the plague the plague it promised to heal.
Daniel Berrigan
#26. Most Americans would agree that Plowshares is a Theatre of the Absurd.
Daniel Berrigan
#27. You have to struggle to stay alive and be of use as long as you can.
Daniel Berrigan
#29. No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being.
Daniel Berrigan
#30. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#31. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#32. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#34. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#35. You have a responsibility to confront the war games - the American killing machine.
Philip Berrigan
#37. Spirituality was the main issue. Connection with God was the main issue.
Daniel Berrigan
#38. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#39. Nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself.
Philip Berrigan
#40. Whatever is going to happen is already happening.
Ted Berrigan
#41. We have military bases all over the world, and that's purely to protect our portfolio abroad.Our investments, and our production, our exploitation of cheap labor and raw materials. We're on the scene to do that, and the military is there to see that it happens.
Philip Berrigan
#42. The only way you can get at the state is by dealing with its laws.
Philip Berrigan
#43. The gift we can offer others is so simple a thing as hope.
Daniel Berrigan
#44. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#45. 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?
Daniel Berrigan
#46. The church is a major bureaucracy, and major bureaucracies are disobedient to the gospel.
Philip Berrigan
#48. The Jesuits I know who have died and all their lives were great teachers, they're the least remembered people.
Daniel Berrigan
#49. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#50. I think of my brother just out of prison again. He will have spent ten years of the last 30 in prison.
Daniel Berrigan
#51. 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.
Daniel Berrigan
#52. One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible.
Daniel Berrigan
#54. I was publishing when I was 20, 21. And it really never stopped.
Daniel Berrigan
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
