William Sloane Coffin
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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
William Sloane Coffin quotes about
We have sold our birthright of freedom and justice for a mess of national security.
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.
I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.
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.
Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.
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.
Christ came to take away our sins, not our minds.
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 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.
The one true freedom in life is to come to terms with death, and as early as possible, for death is an event that embraces all our lives. And the only way to have a good death is to lead a good life. The more we do God's will, the less unfinished business we leave behind when we die.
A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human.
Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.
We are not loved because we are valued; we are valued because we are loved.