Quotes from Daniel Berrigan

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

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

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.

I mean that in a consumer society, the family is the means by which most people become tied to a cycle like this: go along with things, so long as you get enough to buy more and more things even though the whole world is exploited so that a relatively small number of people in this country - US! - can live well. (Our own land and air and water are also plundered in the interests of blind consumerism.)

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.

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.

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?

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

The world is full of suffering and exploitation, and that fact keeps one in touch with the realities that make one's behavior a moral challenge.

The text in sum, invites a woeful deconstruction of bombarding realities. So, one thinks ruefully, is the soul deconstructed in the act of writing—a task looked on (and so rightly) as the original artful dodge.

flower points to a bird, bird cries like a closed eye I see your dreams. Things like my heart I never see, but see hearts bird-shaped, flower-shaped, the radiant weightless shadow my heart casts—upward, to ground...

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

You can't bank on the outcome.

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

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.

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

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.

My father had very little formal education.