"The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?"

"We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community."

"Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth."

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

"Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system."

"I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions."

"When you love people, you see all the good in them, all the Christ in them. God sees Christ, His Son, in us and loves us. And so we should see Christ in others, and nothing else, and love them. There can never be enough of it. There can never be enough thinking about it."

"Think what the world could look like if we took care of the poor even half as well as we do our Bibles!"

"There is plenty to do, for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods."

"I do not know how to love God except by loving the poor. I do not know how to serve God except by serving the poor.... Here, within this great city of nine million people, we must, in this neighborhood, on this street, in this parish, regain a sense of community which is the basis for peace in the world."

"Turn off your radio. Put away your daily paper. Read one review of events a week and spend some time reading good books. They tell too of days of striving and of strife. They are of other centuries and also of our own. They make us realize that all times are perilous, that men live in a dangerous world, in peril constantly of losing or maiming soul and body. We get some sense of perspective reading such books. Renewed courage and faith and even joy to live."

"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."

"Poverty is a strange and elusive thing. ... I condemn poverty and I advocate it; poverty is simple and complex at once; it is a social phenomenon and a personal matter. Poverty is an elusive thing, and a paradoxical one. We need always to be thinking and writing about it, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us. We must talk about poverty because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it."

"The biggest mistake sometimes is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures."

"Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do."

"Maybe I was praying for him then, in my own way. Does God have a set way of prayer, a way that He expects each of us to follow? I doubt it. I believe some people-- lots of people-- pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people. Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer?"

"True love is delicate and kind, full of gentle perception and understanding, full of beauty and grace, full of joy unutterable. There should be some flavor of this in all our love for others. We are all one. We are one flesh in the Mystical Body as man and woman are said to be one flesh in marriage. With such a love one would see all things new; we would begin to see people as they really are, as God sees them."

"You can spend your time agonizing or organizing."

"When it comes to labor and politics, I am inclined to be sympathetic to the left, but when it comes to the Catholic Church, then I am far to the right."

"With prayer, one can go on cheerfully and even happily. Without prayer, how grim a journey!"

"The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor."

"You will know your vocation by the joy that it brings you. You will know. You will know when it's right."

"Common sense in religion is rare, and we are too often trying to be heroic instead of just ordinarily good and kind."

"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."

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

"People, wherever they are, can make a community."

"Those who cannot see Christ in the poor are atheists indeed."

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

"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."

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

"True obedience is a matter of love, which makes it voluntary, not compelled by fear or force."

"Communities are made up of the unlovable as well as the lovable."

"If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens."

"You see I'm such a fool that I'm never afraid of appearing foolish."

"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?"

"Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul."

"Whatever I had read as a child about the saints had thrilled me. I could see the nobility of giving one's life for the sick, the maimed, the leper. But there was another question in my mind. Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place? Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves, but to do away with slavery?"

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

"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."

"If you are going to try and change things, you had better have your wits about you."

"Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them."

"The only solution is love."

"The final word is love."

"It is people who are important, not the masses."

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

"Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair."

"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."

"The older I get, the more I meet people, the more convinced I am that we must only work on ourselves, to grow in grace. The only thing we can do about people is to love them."

"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."

"Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you."