Hélder Câmara Quotes

When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.

If there is some corner of the world which has remained peaceful, but with a peace based on injustices the peace of a swamp with rotten matter fermenting in its depths – we may be sure that that peace is false. Violence attracts violence. Let us repeat fearlessly and ceaselessly: injustices bring revolt, either from the oppressed or from the young, determined to fight for a more just and more human world.

In the developed countries of the capitalist world, the mass media are beginning to become businesses, and huge businesses at that. The freedom of journalists is now becoming, in most cases, a very relative thing: it ends where the interests of the business begin… In socialist areas, it is enough to recall that the means of social communication are the monopoly of the party.

Our responsibility as Christians makes us tremble. The northern hemisphere, the developed area of the world, the 20% who possess 80% of the world’s resources, are of Christian origin. What impression can our African and Asian brethren and the masses in Latin America have of Christianity, if the tree is to be judged by its fruits? For we Christians are largely responsible for the unjust world in which we live.

Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.

I love looking at you, hundred-year-old tree, loaded with shoots and boughs as though you were a stripling. Teach me the secret of growing old like you, open to life, to youth, to dreams, as somebody aware that youth and age are merely steps towards eternity.

In the Father’s house we shall meet Buddhists and Jews, Muslims and Protestants.

God accepts the risk of appearing to be unjust. God looks unjust, but he is not. He asks more from those to whom he gives more. They are not greater or better, they have greater responsibility. They must give more service. Live to serve.

Any time, day or night, at home or in the street, wherever we are, we live bathed in God. If we always kept this in mind, it would be impossible to sin.

Without justice and love, peace will always be a great illusion.

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.