Frasi di Dorothy Day

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“Nessuno ha il diritto di fermarsi e provare disperazione. C'è troppo da fare.”

“Dobbiamo cambiare il sistema. Dobbiamo rovesciare, non il governo, poiché le autorità accusano sempre i comunisti "di cospirare per insegnare a [noi] di fare", ma questo sistema capitalista industriale marcio, decadente e putrido che genera tale sofferenza nel sepolcro bianco di New York .”

“Dobbiamo iniziare. Dobbiamo rinunciare alla guerra come strumento di politica ... Anche se ti parlo, posso essere colpevole di ciò che alcuni uomini chiamano tradimento ... Voi giovani dovreste rifiutare di prendere le armi. Le giovani donne abbattono i manifesti patriottici. E tutti voi, giovani e vecchi, mettete via le vostre bandiere.”

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

“Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.”

“To love with understanding and without understanding. To love blindly, and to folly. To see only what is loveable. To think only of these things. To see the best in everyone around, their virtues rather than their faults. To see Christ in them!”

“But I am sure that God did not intend that there be so many poor. The class structure is of our making and our consent, not His. It is the way we have arranged it, and it is up to us to change it. So we are urging revolutionary change.”

“Now the creed to which I subscribe is like a battle cry, engraved on my heart - the Credo of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Before, in those former times, I could say, "I shall sleep in the dust: and if thou seek me in the morning, I shall not be" (Job 7:21). Now I can say, "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see God. Whom I myself shall see and my eyes shall behold, and not another: this my hope is laid up in my bosom" (Job 19:25-27).”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up.”

“The great work which is to be done is to change public opinion, to indoctrinate, to set small groups to work here and there in different cities who will live a life of sacrifice, typifying the Catholic idea of personal responsibility. Numbers and organizations are not important. We are just beginning after all. But one person can do a tremendous amount of boring from within, in his office, factory, neighborhood, parish, and among his daily acquaintances and associates.”

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

“When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a Communist.”

“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.”

“We stand at the present time with the Communists, who are also opposing war…. The Sermon on the Mount is our Christian manifesto.”

“My whole life so far, my whole experience has been that our failure has been not to love enough. This conviction brought me to a rejection of the radical movement after my early membership in the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist affiliates I worked with.”

“How many thousands, tens of thousands [of prisoners], are in for petty theft, while the 'robber barons' of our day get away with murder. Literally murder, accessories to murder. "Property is Theft." Proudhon wrote--The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor. The early Fathers wrote--The house you don't live in, your empty buildings (novitiates, seminaries) belong to the poor. Property is Theft.”

“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.”

“When Dr. Stern wanted to know whether I was an alcoholic, when Dwight Macdonald asked me seriously whether I drank longshoremen under the table — I can only confess that yes, I did "fling roses with the throng."”

“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.”

“The mystery of the poor is this: That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for Him. It is the only way we have of knowing and believing in our love. 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.”

“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.”

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

“The diocesan papers are full of stories about atrocities in China and the sufferings of the Church and I get a letter from Betty Chang from Tientsin about the communes and the full-employment, etc. When we see the migrant camps, and our factories in the fields, our system does not offer much.”

“Our rule is the works of mercy… It is the way of sacrifice, worship, a sense of reverence.”