Life & Mortality Quote by Daniel Berrigan

Resignation, here, is a moral weapon. Daniel Berrigan - priest, war resister, chronic irritant to American power - isn’t offering a cozy bit of existential gloom. He’s staging a refusal: a line delivered when language itself starts to feel complicit. "I don't know what more to say" reads less like defeat than like an indictment of public discourse, the kind that keeps producing statements while the machinery of violence keeps running. When words have been spent, what remains is witness.

The bluntness of "we're all going to die" strips away the usual religious insulation. A clergyman is expected to traffic in consolation, transcendence, the promise that death is not the final word. Berrigan does the opposite. He places mortality right on the table, not as spiritual drama but as deadline. That pivot turns the second clause - "in a world that is worse than when we entered it" - into a collective accusation: deterioration is not fate, it’s policy, profit, and permission.

The subtext is Berrigan’s lifelong target: the normalization of catastrophe. Whether the "worse world" is Vietnam-era slaughter, nuclear terror, racism, or ecological collapse, the grammar stays pointedly communal. "We" spreads responsibility beyond leaders and generals to the society that shrugs, benefits, and moves on. Coming from a man who repeatedly chose arrest over silence, the line isn’t nihilism; it’s a scalding update of prophetic tradition. If the world is getting worse on our watch, piety without risk is just another form of surrender.