Rowan Williams

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

“At the end of the Middle Ages, nobody would ever have expected the monasteries to vanish from the scene within a generation - yet they did. Change does happen.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Violence is not to be undertaken by private persons. If a state or administration acts without due and visible attention to agreed international process, it acts in a way analogous to a private person. It purports to be judge of its own interest.”

“Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness, a covenant between radically different persons, male and female; and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chosen, a covenant between radically different partners.”

“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.”

“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'.”

“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.”

“The twentieth century may tell us that we have nothing to be complacent about in the recent history of humankind; but it also tells us that there is nothing inevitable about tyranny.”

“St Paul, in his second letter to Corinth, spells this out further in the important eighth and ninth chapters, where he urges some of the Christian communities to be generous to others so that they may also have the chance to be generous in return.”

“The Church is the new creation, it is life and joy, it is the sacramental fellowship in which we share the ultimate purpose of God, made real for us now in our hearing the Word and sharing the Sacrament.”

“As the gospels present it to us, the mission of Jesus of Nazareth is about the way in which the community of God's people - historically, the Jewish people who had first received the law and the covenant - is being re-created in relation to Jesus himself.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing.”