President Bush rightly spoke of an `axis of evil.’ But it is not Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Here is a more likely trio calling for herculean efforts to defeat: environmental degradation, pandemic poverty and a world awash with weapons.
(Speaking June 1, 2002 at the installation of John Bryson Chane as the new Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C.)
Human beings who blind themselves to human need make themselves less human.
There are two ways, my friend, that you can be rich in life. One is to make a lot of money and the other is to have few needs.
I’m not OK, you’re not OK, and that’s OK.
Remember, young people, even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.
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. (Yale Alumni magazine in 1967)
The U.S. government should have vowed “…to see justice done, but by the force of law only, never by the law of force.” (After September 11, 2001)
We yearned for a revolution of imagination and compassion that would oppose the very aggressiveness and antagonism that characterized the actions of both Nixon and the Weathermen. We were convinced nonviolence was more revolutionary than violence. (Referring to the organizers of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam)
Without love violence will change the world; it will change it into a more violent one. (June 1968)
Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and defends them on the basis of morality. (To the Yale Class of 1968 35th reunion, May 2003)
We can never really love anybody with whom we never laugh.
Love is in the giver, not the gift.
He told me that once he forgot himself and opened up like a door with a loose latch and everything fell out and he tried for days to put it all back in the proper order, but he finally gave up and left if there in a pile and loved everything equally.
The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
In life you can either follow your fears or be led by your values, by your passions.
The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverance can restrain violence - reverance for human life and the environment.
Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.
Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.
Christians have to listen to the world as well as to the Word — to science, to history, to what reason and our own experience tell us. We do not honor the higher truth we find in Christ by ignoring truths found elsewhere.
All of life is the exercise of risk.
When a man is drowning, it may be better for him to try to swim than to thrash around waiting for divine intervention.
So don’t let money tell you who you are. Don’t let power tell you who your are. Don’t let enemies and — for God’s sake — don’t let your sins tell you who you are. Don’t prove yourself. That’s taken care of. All we have to do is express ourselves. It’s difficult, but we’re a lot more alive in pain than in complacency.
There is no smaller package in the world that that of a person all wrapped up in himself.
A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human.
God’s love doesn’t seek value; it creates it. It’s not because we have value that we are loved, but because we’re loved that we have value. So you don’t have to prove yourself — ever. That’s taken care of.
God knows it is emotionally satisfying to be righteous with that righteousness that nourishes itself on the blood of sinners. But God also knows that what is emotionally satisfying can be spiritually devastating.
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.
When we live at each other’s mercy, we had better learn to be merciful.
If your heart is full of fear, you won’t seek truth; you’ll seek security. If a heart is full of love, it will have a limbering effect on the mind.
The goal of the Christian life is not to save your soul but to transcend yourself, to vindicate the human struggle of which all of us are a part, to keep hope advancing.
The woman most in need of liberation is the woman in every man and the man in every woman.
The temptation to moralize is strong; it is emotionally satisfying to have enemies rather than problems, to seek out culprits rather than the flaws in the system.
~William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
