William Sloane Coffin
William Sloane Coffin
William Sloane Coffin, Jr.was an American Christian clergyman and long-time peace activist. He was ordained in the Presbyterian church and later received ministerial standing in the United Church of Christ. In his younger days he was an athlete, a talented pianist, a CIA agent, and later chaplain of Yale University, where the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr's social philosophy led him to become a leader in the civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s and 1970s. He also was a...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionClergyman
Date of Birth1 June 1924
CountryUnited States of America
Human beings who blind themselves to human need make themselves less human.
Christ came to take away our sins, not our minds.
To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.
Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart's full of hope, you can be persistent when you can't be optimistic. You can keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. So while I'm not optimistic, I'm always very hopeful.
In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power, and for the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent.
There is nothing anti-intellectual in the leap of faith, for faith is not believing without proof but trusting without reservation.
Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.
There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover's quarrel with their country, a reflection of God's lover's quarrel with all the world.
Of God's love we can say two things: it is poured out universally for everyone from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet; and secondly, God's love doesn't seek value, it creates value. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement.
Patriotism at the expense of another nation is as wicked as racism at the expense of another race. . . Let us resolve to be patriots always, nationalists never. Let us love our country, but pledge allegiance to the earth and to the flora and fauna and human life that it supports - one planet indivisible, with clean air,... soil and water; with liberty, justice and peace for all.
The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance for human life and the environment.
Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself.
Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.