300 Quotes by Karen Armstrong

Every fundamentalist movement I’ve studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.

Jefferson the deist was accused of being an atheist and even a Muslim.

Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.

Compassion asks us to look into our hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse to inflict that pain on anybody else.

The study of the traditions doesn’t necessarily make you want to convert to another tradition, but it helps you to see your own differently and expands your outlook.

Remember that in a threatening environment, the human brain becomes permanently organized for aggression.

Every single one of the major traditions – Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as the monotheisms – teaches a spirituality of empathy, by means of which you relate your own suffering to that of others.

Remember that we can become twinned with an enemy and come to resemble him. Our hatred may become an alter ego, a part of our identity.

The Roman clergy thus adopted the old aristocracy’s ideal of libertas, which had little to do with freedom; rather, it referred to the maintenance of the privileged position of the ruling class, lest society lapse into barbarism.