Dorothy Day Quotes

These powerless people at the bottom are the ones with whom we must begin. They must have the insight and the knowledge to work together and recognise that they are on the right track.

No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There's too much work to do.

The Sexual Revolution is a complete rebellion against authority, natural and supernatural, even against the body and its needs, its natural functions of child bearing. This is not reverence for life, it is a great denial and more resembles Nihilism than the revolution that they think they are furthering.

We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.

I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor,... but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man's dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel pround of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions.

The idea that when the health of one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered is a teaching of St Paul which is timeless.

Recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us even while we wrote about it.

How necessary it is to cultivate a spirit of joy. It is a psychological truth that the physical acts of reverence and devotion make one feel devout. The courteous gesture increases one's respect for others. To act lovingly is to begin to feel loving, and certainly to act joyfully brings joy to others which in turn makes one feel joyful. I believe we are called to the duty of delight.

The work is more important than the talking and the writing about the work.

I cannot worry much about your sins and miseries when I have so many of my own. I can only love you all, poor fellow travellers, fellow sufferers. I do not want to add one least straw to the burden you already carry.

We're living in an age of genocide. ...And we do believe that there is not only the genocide of war, and the genocide that took place with the extermination of the Jews, but the whole program....of birth control and abortion is another form of genocide.... [T]hey claim the poor are bringing forth tremendous numbers of children and so the solution is to kill them off.

The saying of Vatican II is above all, 'Conscience is supreme.'

We must always aim for the impossible; if we lower our goal, we also diminish our effort.

If you are rushed for time, sow time and you will reap time. Go to church and spend a quiet hour in prayer. You will have more time than ever and your work will get done. Sow time with the poor. Sit and listen to them, give them your time lavishly. You will reap time a hundredfold.

It is we ourselves that we have to think about, no one else. That is the way the saints worked. They paid attention to what they were doing, and if others were attracted to them by their enterprise, why, well and good. But they looked to themselves first of all.

Men are beginning to realize that they are not individuals but persons in society, that man alone is weak and adrift, that he must seek strength in common action.

We must talk about poverty, because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.

The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love.

We're under obligation to love - that's the commandment.

Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.

What I want to bring out is how a pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. And each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that.

The anarchist philosophy is that the new social order is to be built up by groupings of men together in communities - whether in communities of work or communities of culture or communities of artists - but in communities.

If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God.

Two years ago, I was saying as I planted seeds in the garden, "I must believe in these seeds, that they fall into the earth and grow into flowers and radishes and beans." It is a miracle to me because I do not understand it. The very fact that they use glib technical phrases does not make it any less a miracle, and a miracle we all accept. Then why not accept God's miracles?

Thank God that He has permitted us to live among the present problems. It is no longer permitted to anyone to be mediocre.

It is only through religion that communism can be achieved, and has been achieved over and over.

My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms.

To feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the harborless without also trying to change the social order so that people can feed, clothe and shelter themselves is just to apply palliatives. It is to show a lack of faith in one’s fellows, their responsibilitie s as children of God, heirs of heaven.

So many sins against the poor cry out to high heaven! One of the most deadly sins is to deprive the laborer of his hire. There is another: to instill in him paltry desires so compulsive that he is willing to sell his liberty and his honor to satisfy them. We are all guilty of concupiscence, but newspapers, radios, television, and battalions of advertising men (woe to that generation!) deliberately stimulate our desires, the satisfaction of which so often means the degradation of the family.

A 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' becomes again another dictator.

To me, birth control and abortion are genocide.I say, make room for children, don't do away with them.

We should live in such a way that our lives wouldn't make much sense if the gospel were not true.

We need to change the system. We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists 'of conspiring to teach [us] to do,' but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York.

Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.

Christ is God or He is the world's greatest liar and imposter.

I can write no other than this: unless we use the weapons of the spirit, denying ourselves and taking up our cross and following Jesus, dying with Him and rising with Him, men will go on fighting, and often from the highest motives, believing that they are fighting defensive wars for justice and in self-defense against present or future aggression.

I think that just as we're in the nuclear era we're also in an era of non-violence. It's undefeatable.

We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt, that peace and abundance may manifest for all.

The Communists in Cuba didn't assist Castro in his revolution. They weren't on the side of the students. They didn't do anything to help in the invasion or the long-continuing struggle from the Oriente province down.

Once a priest told us that no one gets up in the pulpit without promulgating a heresy. He was joking, of course, but what I suppose he meant was the truth was so pure, so holy, that it was hard to emphasize one aspect of the truth without underestimating another, that we did not see things as a whole, but through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said.

I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.

It is not easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.

Every Marxist group that I've known has its theoreticians.

What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships?

We are all called to be saints, St. Paul says, and we might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us.

Paperwork, cleaning the house, dealing with the innumerable visitors who come all through the day, answering the phone, keeping patience and acting intelligently, which is to find some meaning in all that happens-these things, too, are the works of peace, and often seem like a very little way.

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.

The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner. But we are destroying crops, setting fire to entire villages and to the people in them. We are not performing the works of mercy but the works of war.