William Stringfellow Quotes

“death is the moral power upon which the State relies when it removes citizens from society for preventive detention or other political imprisonment, or when it estops free speech, of when it militarizes the police, or when it drives youth into exile, or when it confines millions in black ghettos and consigns millions more to malnutrition and illiteracy, and when it manipulates inflation and credit to preoccupy, demoralize, and thereby conform the middle classes, or when it collusively abets a governor’s defiance of the courts, or when it hunts priests as fugitives.”
― William Stringfellow, William Stringfellow: Essential Writings

“We who are Americans witness in this hour the exhaustion of the American revolutionary ethic. Wherever we turn, that is what is to be seen: in the ironic public policy of internal colonialism symbolized by the victimization of the welfare population, in the usurpation of the federal budget—and thus, the sacrifice of the nation’s material and moral necessities—by an autonomous military-scientific-intelligence principality, by the police aggressions against black citizens, by political prosecutions of dissenters, by official schemes to intimidate the media and vitiate the First Amendment, by cynical designs to demean and neutralize the courts.”
― William Stringfellow, William Stringfellow: Essential Writings

“And no wonder, at this moment, in this country, where the power of death is so militant in the universities, in the corporate structures, in the churches, in the labor movement, in the political institutions, in the Pentagon, in the business of science, in the technological order, in the environment itself, in the realms of ideology, in the State, that, as with Jesus, the Christian, living as a free man, living in transcendence of death’s power, living, thus, as an implacable, insatiable, unappeasable, tireless, and resilient revolutionary, should be regarded by all authorities as a criminal. As in the time of the trial of Jesus Christ, so in this day and place, to truly be a free person is to be a criminal.—ST, 59–68”
― William Stringfellow, William Stringfellow: Essential Writings

“The ecclesiastics were, practically speaking, surrogates of the State.”
― William Stringfellow, William Stringfellow: Essential Writings