Daniel Berrigan > Quotes

“War -- is a last ditch moral nightmare. People begin worshiping a mysterious slouching beast, following after, bowing down, offering gifts, making much of zero; and worse. Love of death, idolatry, fear of life; that roughshod trek of war and warmakers throughout the world, hand in hand with death. Long live death!

They wouldn't worship it if they weren't in love. Or if they weren't in fear. The second being a state of devouring, at least, as the first. I think the clue is the second masquerading as the first -- just as the beast is the ape of god; to do some thing successfully, you have to, above all, hide what your up to. In this way fear can ape love. Death can demand a tribute owed to life, the ape can play God.

Such reflections are of course ill at ease by some: those to whom the state is a given, the church is a given, Western culture a given, war a given, consumerism a given, paying taxes a given. All the neat slots of existence into which one fits, birth to death and every point in between. Nothing to be created, no one to be responsible to, nothing to risk, no objections to lodge. Life is a mechanical horizontal sidewalk, of the kind you sometimes ride at airports between buildings. One is carried along, a zonked spectator...

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. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.”
― Daniel Berrigan

“One cannot be exploited or thwarted from nine to five, then come home and feel loving and lovable.”
― Daniel Berrigan, The Geography of Faith: Underground Conversations on Religious, Political & Social Change

“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, The Geography of Faith: Underground Conversations on Religious, Political & Social Change

“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.)”
― Daniel Berrigan, The Geography of Faith: Underground Conversations on Religious, Political & Social Change

“I think that today young people come toward marriage as growing, searching men and women; and suddenly marriage and parenthood is represented as a stoppage of all that. I mean, young married people become members of a social community, and come under the authority of a political community. Once children come, even some of our more radical youth feel themselves no longer so free to protest various wrongs - because they need work and on their children's account feel more dependent on, more vulnerable to, the power of a town or city or county. They are expected to join with other consumers. They are expected to prepare the next generation for the next wars and for an expansion of the same, the very same community...
I think the Church as I have experienced it during, let's say, thirty years of membership in my order, the Church is speaking less and less to the realities before us. Just one instance is the Church's failure to face and deal with the social and political difficulties of believers. And then when one moves out to another scene, as I have been doing, and meets the people of very mixed religious and ethnic backgrounds, one sees how tragically unresponsive the Church has been - because it has not heard and been moved by the ethical struggles of people on the 'outside,' yet maybe nearer to Christ's own struggle. More and more I see the need for flexibility in the Church. And I feel that one's responsibility to the Church can no longer be expressed by the priest's or parishioner's traditional compliance before powerful and sometimes corrupt 'authority.' I would like to see the resources of the Church brought to bear upon the realities that the Church alone cannot deal with - though it can shed certain light upon many troublesome issues. It is such matters I am discussing now with the families I stay with. I hope we can come upon something new, which will help us in the very real and new situations we are facing, I hope there is a spiritual breakthrough of sorts awaiting us, so that we can learn to live together in a new and stronger and less 'adjusted' way - 'adjusted' to the forces in America which plunder other countries and our own country as well.”
― Daniel Berrigan, The Geography of Faith: Underground Conversations on Religious, Political & Social Change

“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, The Raft is Not the Shore: Conversations toward a Buddhist/Christian Awareness

“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.”
― Daniel Berrigan, The Geography of Faith: Underground Conversations on Religious, Political & Social Change

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

“Well, I look upon the Weathermen as a very different phenomenon because I have seen in them very different resources and purposes. I believe that their violent rhythm was induced by the violence of the society itself - and only after they struggled for a long time to be nonviolent. I don't think we can expect young people, passionate young people, to be indefinitely nonviolent when every pressure put on them is one of violence - which I think describes the insanity of our society. And I can excuse the violence of those people as a temporary thing. I don't see a hardened, long-term ideological violence operating, as in the case of the Klansmen.”
― Daniel Berrigan, The Geography of Faith: Underground Conversations on Religious, Political & Social Change

“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, The Geography of Faith: Underground Conversations on Religious, Political & Social Change

“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, The Geography of Faith: Underground Conversations on Religious, Political & Social Change

“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.”
― Daniel Berrigan, Exodus: Let My People Go

“..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...”
― Daniel Berrigan

“I think that life always is ambiguous. This we accept, the human situation being murky and conditioned by the past. But what we look for, as Camus says, is at least a world in which murder will not be legitimate. We don't look for a world in which murder will not occur, that seems unrealistic. But we don't want murder to be looked upon as virtuous and legitimate. Maybe that's a minimal definition of the kind of change we work for.”
― Daniel Berrigan, The Raft is Not the Shore: Conversations toward a Buddhist/Christian Awareness

“I have never been able to look upon myself as a criminal and I would feel that in a society in which sanity is publicly available I could go on with the kind of work I have always done throughout my life. I never tried to hurt a person. I tried to do something symbolic with pieces of paper. We tend to overlook the crimes of our political and business leaders. We don't send to jail Presidents and their advisers and certain congressmen and senators who talk like bloodthirsty mass murderers. We concentrate obsessively and violently on people who are trying to say things very differently and operate in different ways.”
― Daniel Berrigan, The Geography of Faith: Underground Conversations on Religious, Political & Social Change

“[Dorothy Day] lived as though the truth were actually true.”
― Daniel Berrigan