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The state, conceived in violence, and backed by violence, will never achieve true peace.

— Philip Berrigan Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire (1996)

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More quotes by Philip Berrigan

The church is a major bureaucracy, and major bureaucracies are disobedient to the gospel.

Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire (1996)

According to a University of South Carolina study, violence in America rose 42 percent during the Vietnam War. This is hardly surprising. Our leaders are lawless, so why not we?

Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire (1996)

The Biblical view of the law, the courts, and the state is profoundly radical. The Bible looks upon the state as a kind of rebellious artifice; it is spurious, a human creation in rebellion against God.

Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire (1996)

We Christians forget (if we ever learned) that attempts to redress real or imagined injustice by violent means are merely another exercise in denial — denial of God and her nonviolence towards us, denial of love of neighbor, denial of laws essential to our being.

Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire (1996)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Philip Berrigan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.