Quotes from William Sloane Coffin

The woman most in need of liberation is the woman in every man and the man in every woman.

Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.

Human beings who blind themselves to human need make themselves less human.

I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.

There is nothing anti-intellectual in the leap of faith, for faith is not believing without proof but trusting without reservation.

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.

Christians have no business thinking that the good life consists mainly in not doing bad things. We have no business thinking that to do evil in this world you have to be a Bengal tiger, when, in fact, it is enough to be a tame tabby—a nice person but not a good one. In short, Pentecost makes it clear that nothing is so fatal to Christianity as indifference.

It is terribly important to realize that the leap of faith is not so much a leap of thought as of action. For while in many matters it is first we must see then we will act; in matters of faith it is first we must do then we will know, first we will be and then we will see. One must, in short, dare to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty.

Law is not as disinterested as our concepts of law pretend; law serves power; law in large measure is a recapitulation of the status quo; it confirms a rigid order designed to insulate the beneficiaries of the status quo from the disturbances of change. The painful truth--one with a long history--is that police are around in large part to guarantee a peaceful disgestion for the rich.

Christ came to take away our sins, not our minds.

i'm not always optimistic but i am always hopeful.

Isn't that what growing up is all about - learning to outlast despair?

Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.

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.

The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance for human life and the environment.

Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.

A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human.

Human unity is not something we are called on to create — only something we are called on to recognize.

All of life is the exercise of risk.

In life you can either follow your fears or be led by your values, by your passions.

Faith handles the ultimate incongruities of life, humor handles the more immediate ones.

Only reverence can restrain violence - reverence for human life and the environment.

It's too bad that one has to conceive of sports as being the only arena where risks are, [for] all of life is risk exercise. That's the only way to live more freely, and more interestingly.