Daily Inspiration Quote by Daniel Berrigan

Its power is in the refusal to romance struggle. Berrigan, a priest who treated dissent as a sacrament, isn’t offering inspiration; he’s administering a bracing diagnosis. The line is plain to the point of seeming obvious, which is exactly the trick. By stripping away flourish, he denies his audience the emotional sugar that often props up political talk. No heroic arc, no guarantee of victory, not even a timetable. Just the cost.

The intent is twofold: to warn and to recruit. “Change things” is deliberately non-specific, a broad bucket that can hold war, racism, poverty, empire, the church’s complacency. That vagueness isn’t laziness; it’s strategy. Berrigan speaks like someone who’s watched movements fracture over details and still insists the moral direction is clear. The real emphasis lands on “not going to be easy” - a pre-emptive rebuttal to the consumer idea of reform, the fantasy that a petition, an election, or a viral moment is the same as transformation.

Context sharpens the understatement. Berrigan’s life ran through the Vietnam era and beyond: arrests, exile, surveillance, the Catholic left’s battles with both state and hierarchy. When someone who has burned draft files and served time says it won’t be easy, it’s not pessimism; it’s solidarity with the exhausted. The subtext is almost pastoral: if you’re discouraged, you’re not failing - you’re encountering the real terrain. The sentence lowers expectations so commitment can survive reality.