William Sloane Coffin

"Health is wholeness of body, mind, and spirit."

"Adventure waits for those brave enough to seek it."

"Imagination is the laboratory where the future is created."

"Technology should serve humanity's deepest values."

"History's greatest lesson is that change is always possible."

"Philosophy is thinking hard about what matters most."

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."

"I think of the church as a place where you can come and think about something other than money."

"The church should not be the servant of the state, but its conscience."

"A person is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits."

"We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims."

"Prayer is the heart of all religion. But so often it becomes a substitute for action."

"The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs, but by new minds with old values."

"I believe the church should lift up the suffering and speak truth to power."

"Forgiveness is not forgetting. It is rather a quiet refusal to let the past control the future."

"We should measure the health of a society not by its GNP but by the health of its children."

"In the final analysis we are not imprisoned by the bars which surround us; we are imprisoned by the bars we accept."

"Never underestimate the power of nostalgia, especially when combined with liquor."

"Good preaching comes from the overflow of the heart."

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally."

"A liberal is a person whose interest in the welfare of the people is exceeded by his interest in his own."

"Loyalty to a petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human being."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel a responsibility for their fate."

"The church is not a leisure class for the pious, but a task force for the renewal of society."

"It is my firm belief that the institutional church today is for the most part dead."

"To be a Christian is to affirm Jesus as Lord, and you cannot do it without losing your moral and intellectual autonomy."

"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate."

"Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will."

"We are not makers of history. We are made by history."

"I have to take seriously what I might call the spiritual hunger of our time."