63 Quotes by Daniel Berrigan

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.

I don’t know a more irreligious attitude, one more utterly bankrupt of any human content, than one which permits childred to be destroyed.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?