Daily Inspiration Quote by Daniel Berrigan

Berrigan’s line refuses the most seductive excuse politics offers: that violence becomes permissible when victory looks remote. The sentence is built like a moral trapdoor. “One is called” shifts the question away from preference or strategy and into vocation: nonviolence isn’t a tactic you adopt when it’s effective, it’s obedience to a demand that precedes outcomes. That framing is pure clerical rhetoric, but it’s also a hard-edged piece of activist realism. If your ethics depend on likely success, your ethics are just optimism with better branding.

The subtext is aimed at the weary and the radical at once. To the exhausted reformer, it offers permission to keep going without the sugar high of progress. To the militant, it challenges the romance of “necessary” brutality by stripping away its usual alibi: that history forced your hand. Berrigan implies the opposite. The more “impossible” the change looks, the more tempted you are to reach for coercion, and the more urgent the discipline becomes.

Context matters because Berrigan lived this claim: antiwar Catholic resistance, civil disobedience, prison time, a public theology that treated empire and violence as intertwined habits. In the Vietnam era especially, nonviolence wasn’t polite disagreement; it was confrontation without dehumanization. The line’s power comes from its blunt bargain: you don’t get guaranteed results, you get a way of being. That’s not consolation. It’s a standard.