Philip Berrigan Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

The church is a major bureaucracy, and major bureaucracies are disobedient to the gospel. — Philip Berrigan

You have a responsibility to confront the war games - the American killing machine. — Philip Berrigan

War can't end terrorism. War is terrorism. — Philip Berrigan

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

The only way you can get at the state is by dealing with its laws. — Philip Berrigan

If voting made any difference, it would be illegal, — Philip Berrigan

[ To break the law] would still be an imperative. I guess we do it for both reasons. You try to be a Christian, you try to come from that tradition of the Jewish prophets and then Christ and everything since. That becomes your handbook. "Witness" is the key word. You witness against the injustice, against the atrocity, against the heavy-handedness, and all the rest. We try to make a statement to other people, and we try to say it's your responsibility, too. — Philip Berrigan

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

The Pentagon is, admissibly, the most powerful institution in history. — Philip Berrigan

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

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

The use of depleted uranium in the Gulf War has been particularly effective. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood.' - HAROLD PINTER A $19 trillion price tag since 1940 for past, present, and future wars reveals our addiction to war and bloodshed. — Philip Berrigan