Warren Hicks

“death is the moral power upon which the State relies when it removes citizens from society for preventive detention or other political imprisonment, or when it estops free speech, of when it militarizes the police, or when it drives youth into exile, or when it confines millions in black ghettos and consigns millions more to malnutrition and illiteracy, and when it manipulates inflation and credit to preoccupy, demoralize, and thereby conform the middle classes, or when it collusively abets a governor’s defiance of the courts, or when it hunts priests as fugitives.”
― William Stringfellow, William Stringfellow: Essential Writings

“In daily life we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.”
― Brother David Steindl-Rast

“Meanwhile, the old man who goes about gathering dog-lime walks in the gutter without looking up and his tread is more majestic than that of the Episcopal minister approaching the pulpit of a Sunday. These things astonish me beyond words.”
― William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Vol. 1: 1909-1939

“And no wonder, at this moment, in this country, where the power of death is so militant in the universities, in the corporate structures, in the churches, in the labor movement, in the political institutions, in the Pentagon, in the business of science, in the technological order, in the environment itself, in the realms of ideology, in the State, that, as with Jesus, the Christian, living as a free man, living in transcendence of death’s power, living, thus, as an implacable, insatiable, unappeasable, tireless, and resilient revolutionary, should be regarded by all authorities as a criminal. As in the time of the trial of Jesus Christ, so in this day and place, to truly be a free person is to be a criminal.—ST, 59–68”
― William Stringfellow, William Stringfellow: Essential Writings