Top 35 Daniel Berrigan Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

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

— Daniel Berrigan

3. “The gift we can offer others is so simple a thing as hope.”

— Daniel Berrigan

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

— Daniel Berrigan

5. “I’d like to die with my boots on.”

— Daniel Berrigan

6. “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

7. “No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being.”

— Daniel Berrigan

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

— Daniel Berrigan

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

— Daniel Berrigan

10. “I don’t have to prove my life. I just have to live.”

— Daniel Berrigan

11. “You just have to do what you know is right.”

— Daniel Berrigan

12. “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

13. “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

14. “One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.”

— Daniel Berrigan

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

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

— Daniel Berrigan

19. “Spirituality was the main issue. Connection with God was the main issue.”

— Daniel Berrigan

20. “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

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

— Daniel Berrigan

22. “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

23. “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

24. “One cannot be exploited or thwarted from nine to five, then come home and feel loving and lovable.”

— Daniel Berrigan

25. “It’s not going to be easy to change things.”

— Daniel Berrigan

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

— Daniel Berrigan

27. “My father had very little formal education.”

— Daniel Berrigan

28. “To grow one has to feel pain, know uneasiness – as you certainly must know from your work as a child psychiatrist. Isn’t it more dangerous, more awful, when people don’t feel the kinds of doubts and misgivings and confusions we’ve been talking about, when instead their voices are stifled by the permeating ideology, the official seductive presence of the state and the marketplace and the military machine?”

— Daniel Berrigan

29. “You can’t bank on the outcome.”

— Daniel Berrigan

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

— Daniel Berrigan

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

— Daniel Berrigan

32. “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.”

— Daniel Berrigan

33. “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

34. “You know, I don’t at all hesitate to be a bit utopian about all this because I think hope is itself an act, a very big leap, which in a sense defies the grim facts always about us and opens up new ways of thinking about things.”

— Daniel Berrigan

35. “I never met a Jesuit before I applied for the order.”

— Daniel Berrigan

36. “I’ve never heard of any community that failed because it lacked material resources. Communities fail because they lack imagination and spiritual contact and soul and a sense of others and staying power and courage to move together and to live together.”

— Daniel Berrigan

37. “Unless you somehow have a foot outside of your culture, the culture will swallow you whole.”

— Daniel Berrigan

38. “I may be oversimplifying, but it does seem to me that, as the saying goes, we are what we eat, and that’s a cultural statement as well, which means the kinds of families that have been ‘flourishing’ in this society for a hundred and fifty years, especially in the white middle classes, have become what they have embraced: consumerism; militant self-interest; and wars to subdue ‘natives,’ obtain international power, and control various governments.”

— Daniel Berrigan