War & Peace Quote by Daniel Berrigan

Berrigan refuses the sentimental version of peace: the kind you can order like a ceasefire and consume like relief. He frames peace as labor, not mood, and he does it with a grim bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu. War, in public life, is treated as the hard choice, the adult choice, the expensive but necessary choice. Berrigan flips that prestige. Peace, he argues, carries its own price tag and its own casualties, except the injuries are more politically inconvenient: disgrace, prison, death meted out not by an enemy abroad but by your own society defending its normal routines.

The line’s power comes from its insistence on symmetry. “At least as costly… at least as exigent… at least as disruptive” hammers away at the lazy moral accounting that imagines peace as passive and war as active. It’s also a confession of strategy. If peace is disruptive, it will collide with institutions that profit from stability-as-usual, including the state, the courts, and the media’s appetite for tidy narratives. Berrigan isn’t warning pacifists to be nicer; he’s warning them to be braver.

Context sharpens the threat. As a Catholic priest and anti-Vietnam War activist, Berrigan lived the sentence: the Catonsville Nine, the draft files burned, the raids, trials, and time underground. He’s speaking from a tradition where “peacemaking” is not etiquette but direct action, a theology that expects the cross, not applause. Peace, for him, is not the absence of conflict; it’s the decision to pick a different fight.