Daily Inspiration Quote by Daniel Berrigan

Moral clarity is often sold as comfort; Berrigan’s version lands as a dare. “You just have to do what you know is right” sounds like a hallway pep talk until you remember who’s speaking: a Jesuit priest who treated conscience as an instrument of resistance, not private therapy. The plainness is the point. No caveats, no procedural steps, no appeal to authority. “Just” strips away the bureaucratic alibis that let decent people outsource responsibility to institutions, rules, or “the times.”

The subtext is sharper than the surface. “What you know” doesn’t mean whatever you feel; it implies a hard-won knowledge forged by attention: to the Gospels, to victims of war, to the human cost hidden behind policy language. Berrigan’s life - especially the anti-Vietnam War actions that led to arrest and surveillance - frames “right” as something you may recognize long before you’re allowed to act on it. He’s acknowledging the gap between moral recognition and social permission, then refusing to treat that gap as exculpatory.

Context matters: a clergyman saying this during the era of draft cards and napalm is not praising quiet decency. He’s rebuking the church’s temptation toward respectability, and the liberal tendency to confuse opinion with obligation. The line works because it’s small enough to memorize and heavy enough to indict. It offers no guarantee of success or safety; it assumes the cost. “Do” is the engine: morality isn’t a stance, it’s a risk you take with your body and your record.