Daniel Berrigan Quotes

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.