Daily Inspiration Quote by Daniel Berrigan

Apocalyptic on purpose, Berrigan stacks his clauses like a litany: worse, worse, worse. The rhythm matters. Repetition turns policy critique into moral indictment, the way a sermon turns private unease into public urgency. He isn’t offering a trend line; he’s insisting that “normal” has become obscene.

The sharpest phrase is “dumping of creation down a military rat hole.” It’s not just a complaint about budgets. It’s theological language smuggled into geopolitical argument: “creation” names the world as gift, not raw material, and a “rat hole” suggests secrecy, rot, and waste. In one image he collapses two scandals that are often kept separate: the economic siphoning of public resources into weapons, and the spiritual corrosion that comes from treating annihilation as a reasonable form of insurance.

Berrigan’s intent is confrontational: to make incrementalism feel complicit. By saying “worse than it ever was,” he refuses the comforting story that modernity naturally bends toward peace, or that technological sophistication equals moral progress. The subtext is also a warning about attention. An arms race isn’t only missiles and budgets; it’s a way of organizing imagination around fear, turning whole societies into administrators of permanent emergency.

Context matters: Berrigan was a priest-activist forged in the Cold War and Vietnam, when nuclear brinkmanship and televised war made the contradiction between Christian ethics and state violence impossible to ignore. His absolutism is strategic. If the world is being shoveled into a “rat hole,” polite language becomes part of the machinery.