Dorothy Day died on Nov.29,1980. She's been celebrated by everybody from Pope Francis to Barack Obama as one of the great figures in American history.

But she didn't like all the hype, and coined the phrase:
"Don't call us saints, we don't want to be dismissed that easily."

Nonetheless, here's a little more about her.

Dorothy was born in Brooklyn in 1897. She worked as a journalist for radical newspapers in the 1920s and found most of her friends in the bohemian crowds that gathered in Greenwich Village. While living with a man she loved in 1926, she became pregnant and experienced a mysterious conversion to Jesus. As a Roman Catholic, she struggled to unite her personal faith with passion for social justice until she met Peter Maurin, with whom she founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933. Through hospitality houses in the city, agronomic universities on the land, and roundtable discussions for the clarification of thought, they aimed to “create a new society within the shell of the old,” offering American Christianity the witness of a new monasticism that combines piety and practice, charity and justice.
www.commonprayer.net

A few nuggets of wisdom from Dorothy...

“I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”

“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?”

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

“What we would like to do is change the world...by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world.”

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

“If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because
I have not been embarrassed to talk about God.”

“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.”