Rowan Williams Quotes

A healthy human environment is one in which we try to make sense of our limits, of the accidents that can always befall us and the passage of time which inexorably changes us.

The past is what the present is doing now.

Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable.

Even when I was Archbishop of Wales and working with new bishops, I used to say, not realising quite how true it was, 'One of the things you will do as a bishop is disappoint people'.

One of the most powerful defences the media can offer for controversial actions is, of course, public interest.

How do we live in a way that shows an understanding that we genuinely live in a shared world, not one that simply belongs to us?

A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.

Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old.

Christians should emphatically be campaigning for justice for the poor - but the Church is not a campaign.

We shall not find life by refusing to let go of our precious, protected selves.

I value unity because I believe we learn truth from each other in this process.

Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow.

If there is one thing I long for above all else, it's that the years to come may see Christianity in this country able again to capture the imagination of our culture.

The Church exists to connect people at the level of their hunger for a new world.

The planet should not be used as a warehouse of resources to serve humanity's selfishness

To be a Christian is to believe we are commanded and authorised to say certain things to the world; to say things that will make disciples of all nations.

Perhaps a good resolution for the new year would be to keep asking what world we want to pass on to the next generation. Indeed to ask whether we have a real and vivid sense of that next generation.

In loving his own productive, generative, generous love, God loves all those ways in which that love can be realised in creation.

Friendship is something that creates equality and mutuality, not a reward for finding equality or a way of intensifying existing mutuality.

In the context of interfaith encounter, we need to bring to the surface how our actual beliefs shape what we do - not simply to agree that kindness is better than cruelty.

Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.

Economists are coming to acknowledge that measures of national wealth and poverty in terms strictly of average income tell you little that is significant of the health or viability of a society.

So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.

We must support government coercion over enforcing international protocols and speed limits on motorways if we want the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions of people to die.

Well, today, the diocese is more than ever a microcosm.

To conclude: good journalism is one of the models of good conversation and communication in the wider social context.

We are called to show utter commitment to the God who is revealed in Jesus and to all those to whom His invitation is addressed.

In a spiritually sensitive culture, then, it might well be that age is something to be admired or envied.

A public is a necessary fiction.

Serving democracy and nourishing the common good is, for the media, something that requires not only attacking corrupt secrecies in a society, but also defending non-corrupt communication.

What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism.

And when the world is created, it is created in such a way that those eternal objects of God's loving wisdom become actualities - interacting with one another, relating to God in the finite realm.

I do feel that federation, loose parallel processes, are less than we've got, less than we could have and, in the very long run, less than what God wants in the Church.

My visit this autumn is an opportunity to continue that rich tradition of visits between Canterbury and Rome.

The world's creation has a beginning from the world's point of view, not from God's.

It takes the whole church to know the whole truth.

I think there is a great deal of interest still in the Christian faith.

It does not matter to the killers if their victims are Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Humanist; what matters is that they show that they can kill where they please.

It would be a real failure if agreeing that it [abortion] was not an electoral issue provided an alibi for taking it seriously as a public issue.

It's a moral question.

So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.