Berrigan Quotes & Sayings

I never met a Jesuit before I applied for the order. — Daniel Berrigan

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

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

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

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

Whatever is going to happen is already happening. — Ted Berrigan

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. — Daniel Berrigan

My father had very little formal education. — Daniel 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 gift we can offer others is so simple a thing as hope. — Daniel Berrigan

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

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

I'd like to die with my boots on. — Daniel Berrigan

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

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

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

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

You can't bank on the outcome. — Daniel Berrigan

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

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

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

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

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

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

No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being. — Daniel Berrigan

The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred. — Daniel 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

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

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

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. — Daniel Berrigan

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

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

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

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

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

Never be born, never be died. — Ted Berrigan

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

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

You just have to do what you know is right. — Daniel Berrigan

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

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

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

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

I was publishing when I was 20, 21. And it really never stopped. — Daniel 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 only way you can get at the state is by dealing with its laws. — Philip Berrigan

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

It's not going to be easy to change things. — Daniel Berrigan

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

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

[ 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

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. — Daniel Berrigan

Twenty years ago at a conference I attended of theologians and professors of religion, an Indian Christian friend told the assembly, "We are going to hear about the beauties of several traditions, but that does not mean that we are going to make a fruit salad." When it came my turn to speak, I said, "Fruit salad can be delicious! I have shared the Eucharist with Father Daniel Berrigan, and our worship became possible because of the sufferings we Vietnamese and Americans shared over many years." Some of the Buddhists present were shocked to hear I had participated in the Eucharist, and many Christians seemed truly horrified. To me, religious life is life. I do not see any reason to spend one's whole life tasting just one kind of fruit. We human beings can be nourished by the best values of many traditions. — Thich Nhat Hanh

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

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

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