Quotes By Daniel Berrigan

I never met a Jesuit before I applied for the order.

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.

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

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.

I'd like to die with my boots on.

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.

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

You can't bank on the outcome.

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

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.

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.

It's not going to be easy to change things.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

My father had very little formal education.

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

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

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.

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