Top 189 Quotes & Sayings by Dorothy Day - Page 3

Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?

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

We want no revolution; we want the brotherhood of men. We want men to love one another. We want all men to have what is sufficient for their needs. And now - strange thought - the devil has so maneuvered that the people turn from Him because those who profess Him are clothed in soft raiment and sit at well-spread tables and deny the poor.

It is people who are important, not the masses.

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.

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

One of the disconcerting facts about the spiritual life is that God takes you at your word.

Women think with their whole bodies

The sense is always that community is natural to people.

I have been disillusioned, however, this long, long time in the means used by any but the saints to live in this world God has made for us.

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.

Advent is a time of waiting, of expectation, of silence. Waiting for our Lord to be born. A pregnant woman is so happy, so content. She lives in such a garment of silence, and it is as though she were listening to hear the stir of life within her. One always hears that stirring compared to the rustling of a bird in the hand. But the intentness which which one awaits such stirring is like nothing so much as a blanket of silence.

I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.

It's Godlike to love man - even in his sin - merely because he's man.

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.

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.

To try to stop war by placing before men's eyes the terrible suffering involved will never succeed, because men are willing (in their thoughts and imaginations at least) to face any kind of suffering when motivated by noble aims like the vague and tremendous concept of freedom ... Or, in their humility (or sloth - who knows?) men are quite willing to leave decisions to others 'who know more about it than we do.

Charity is only as warm as those who administer it.

I was always much impressed, in reading prison memoirs of revolutionists, such as Lenin and Trotsky ... by the amount of reading they did, the languages they studied, the range of their plans for a better social order. (Or rather, for a new social order.) In the Acts of the Apostles there are constant references to the Way and the New Man.

I too complain ceaselessly in my heart and in my words too. My very life is a protest. Against government, for instance.

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.

When they call you a saint, it means basically that you are not to be taken seriously.

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.

It is penance to work, to give oneself to others, to endure the pinpricks of community living.

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

Just as the birds of the air are fed, we'll continue to be fed.

There is something so horrifying and so sad when people are living alone. That is why the old and lonely come to us.

Castro wasn't a Marxist. He was a Catholic educated by the Christian Brothers and the Jesuits. But fundamentally, I'm not talking about practising Catholics, but rather about something which is inbred; that is, a part of your country, your heritage, your life.

We certainly can try to grow in love, and it is good practice, this giving what we've got, whether it is a cup of coffee or money to pay the grocery bill.

If we had had the privilege of giving hospitality to a Ho Chi Minh, with what respect and interest we would have served him, as a man of vision, as a patriot, a rebel against foreign invaders.

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.

I think anarchy is natural to the Catholic. The Church is pretty anarchistic, you know. Who pays attention to the Pope or the Cardinals?

How much did I hear of religion as a child? Very little, and yet my heart leaped when I heard the name of God. I do believe every soul has a tendency toward God.

We also know that religion, as the Marxists have always insisted, has, too often, like an opiate, tended to put people to sleep to the reality and the need for the present struggle for peace and justice.

Together with the works of mercy, feeding, sheltering, and clothing our brothers, we must indoctrinate.

Marx.... Lenin.... Mao Tse-Tung.... These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions.

We are not, most of us, capable of exalted emotion, save rarely.

A conversion is a lonely experience.

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

What I read in the Bible seemed to me to be very much a part of daily life.

Often we comfort ourselves only with words, but if we pray enough, the conviction will come too that Christ is our King, not Stalin, Bevins, or Truman. That He has all things in His hands, that 'all things work together for good for those that love Him.

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.

The theoretician of the Marxist revolution in Cuba certainly wasn't Castro. It was Don Carlos Rafaelo Rodriguez. He was the theoretician and very often people say he will take over. But I don't believe it. I think that it's a very good combination - the Catholic man working together with a man like that who has everything pretty well planned.

Be close enough to people so that you are indifferent to the material. And also have faith.

The whole point of view of the anarchist is that everything must start from the bottom up, from man. It seems to me so human a philosophy.

It is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.

Freedom has its roots in religion.

When people are standing up for our present rotten system, they are being worse than Communists, it seems to me.

Of all the charges made against the Communists these days of congressional investigations, the charge of loose morals is seldom heard, so very loose have become those of "Christian" people.

Some can go further than others.

For me Christ was not to be bought for thirty pieces of silver but with my heart's blood. We buy not cheap in this market.

Too much praise makes you feel you must be doing something terribly wrong.

This is so rich a country that luxury has developed at the expense of necessities, and even the destitute partake of the luxury. We are the rich country of the world, like Dives at the feast. We must try hard, we must study to be poor like Lazarus at the gate, who was taken into Abraham's bosom.

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?

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.

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

We are all one body, we are all one.

When it comes down to it, even on the natural plane, it is much happier and more enlivening to love than to be loved.

And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. A child is not enough. A husband and children, no matter how busy one may be kept by them, are not enough. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness.

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.