No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being.
Daniel BerriganRead
The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.
Interpretation
The loss of one life is too great a cost for justifying any principle, no matter how important.
This quote emphasizes the inherent value of human life and suggests that no ideology or principle is worth the cost of death. It reflects a moral stance against justifying violence or sacrifices in the name of beliefs, advocating for the sanctity of life above all else.
In practice
During a debate on the morality of war, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of valuing human life.
No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being.
Instead of building the peace by attacking injustices like starvation, disease, illiteracy, political and economic servitude, we spend a trillion dollars on war since 1946, until hatred and conflict have become the international preoccupation.
Of course, let us have peace, we cry, "but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties ... " There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison, and death in its wake.
The God of life summons us to life; more, to be lifegivers, especially toward those who lie under the heel of the powers.
For my part, I believe that the vain, glorious and the violent will not inherit the earth. . . . In pursuance of that faith my friends and I take the hands of the dying in our hands. And some of us travel to the Pentagon, and others live in the Bowery and serve there, and others speak unpopularly and plainly of the fate of the unborn and of convicted criminals. It is all one.
Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.
To believe in luck, if it were not a solecism so to use the word believe, is skepticism.
Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt
Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.
Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.
Our fates are in the hands of An Almighty God, to whom I can with pleasure confide my own; he can save us, or destroy us; his Councils are fixed and cannot be disappointed, and all his designs will be Accomplished.
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