“Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.”
“I think despair is an endemic part of revolution. No revolution happens within one lifetime so we work to capacity, we believe in what we are doing knowing full well we won’t see the fruits of our labor. It is a hard place to hold.”
"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent."
“People living in poverty and with sickness deserve something better than what they’ve been offered, which is the sharp end of a stick.”
"Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgement at how they carry it. "
"Poverty is not a fate, it is a condition; It is not a misfortune, it is an injustice."
“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”
“Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don't yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it's actually going to be possible.”
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”
“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.”
“To practice nonviolence, first of all we must learn to deal peacefully with ourselves.”
“God is not a Christian. God accepts as pleasing those who live by the best lights available to them that they can discern. All truth, all sense of beauty, all awareness of goodness has one source, God, who is not confined to one place, time or people.”
"I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community."
“Theological formation is the gradual and painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.”
Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
“When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way, critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominant culture.”
Talking About a Revolution
“Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.”
"We cannot afford to do theology unrelated to human existence. We cannot be 'objective,' but must recognize, with Imamu Baraka, that 'there is no objective anything' -least of all theology"
The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998
“i hope i die
warmed
by the life that i tried
to live”
Theology of Hope
Hope's statements of promise anticipate the future. In the promises, the hidden future already announces itself and exerts its influence on the present through the hope it awakens.
John Ames, in Gilead
“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”
TED Talk
"Human connection is as threatened by unhealthy peace as by unhealthy conflict."
"I think this nation should be, for the foreseeable future, in mourning; one must face the fact that this Christian nation may never have read any of the Gospels, but they do understand money."
Quoted in Celebrant's Flame: Daniel Berrigan in Memory and Reflection
"We're not trying to play God. We're trying to play human."
May 1953, Boston, MA
"Christ’s death was not a ransom, or a penal substitution, or a penal example; it was a revelation of the sacrificial love of God intended to awaken an answering love in the human heart."
“All I maintain is that there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with pestilences.”