Daily Inspiration Quote by Daniel Berrigan

Revolution, for Berrigan, is only as compelling as its capacity for self-restraint. The line snaps with a bitter paradox: the uprising that claims to cure society can become its own contagion, replicating the very brutality, deception, and coercion it rose to oppose. By doubling down on the word "plague", he turns political idealism into an epidemiology lesson. Promises spread fast; so do habits of domination.

Berrigan’s clerical voice matters here. As a Catholic priest and antiwar activist who opposed Vietnam and state violence, he watched liberation rhetoric get baptized in moral certainty, then weaponized. The intent isn’t to sneer at change, but to interrogate the sacramental aura revolutions often give themselves: once a cause is declared holy, almost anything can be justified in its name. The subtext warns that purity narratives - the insistence that history has finally found its righteous agents - are precisely how movements excuse terror, purges, censorship, and the slow normalization of cruelty.

The phrase "interesting insofar" is slyly deflationary, like he’s refusing to be impressed by pageantry or slogans. Interest, in his measure, is ethical: does the revolution break the cycle, or just rotate the uniforms? It’s also a challenge to spectatorship. Western audiences romanticize revolt until it gets messy; Berrigan flips that, arguing the only revolt worth romanticizing is the one that refuses the easy, infectious thrill of becoming the thing it hates.