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" I have nothing maternal in me, and men want to be mothered a lot of the time. "

Karen Armstrong

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" I have a very sharp tongue, I'm very impatient, and it's a lifelong struggle. "

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" But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value. "

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" I like silence; I'm a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness. "

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" Compassion is not a popular virtue. "

Karen Armstrong

" Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day. "

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" If we want to create a viable, peaceful world, we've got to integrate compassion into the gritty realities of 21st century life. "

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" Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective. "

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" When violence becomes imbedded in a region, then this affects everything. It affects your dreams, your fantasies and relationships, and your religion becomes violent, too. "

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" Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage. "

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" Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength. "

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" Now I think one of the reasons why religion developed in the way that it did over the centuries was precisely to curb this murderous bent that we have as human beings. "

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" The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ. "

Karen Armstrong

" Let's use our stories to encourage listening to one another and to hear not just the good news, but also the pain that lies at the back of a lot of people's stories and histories. "

Karen Armstrong

" Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar. "

Karen Armstrong

" Well, logos is science or reason, something that helps us to function practically and effectively in the world, and it must therefore be closely in tune and reflect accurately the realities of the world around us. "

Karen Armstrong

" Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people? "

Karen Armstrong

" There is a danger in monotheism, and it's called idolatry. And we know the prophets of Israel were very, very concerned about idolatry, the worship of a human expression of the divine. "

Karen Armstrong

" Compassion doesn't, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way. "

Karen Armstrong

" Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it. "

Karen Armstrong

" I believe in holiness and sacredness in other people. It doesn't mean that the clouds part and I see God. That's a juvenile way of thinking about it. "

Karen Armstrong

" Human beings have always been mythmakers. "

Karen Armstrong

" Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity. "

Karen Armstrong

" We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus; but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level. "

Karen Armstrong

" I was a lousy nun. I couldn't do it. I couldn't find God. It wasn't suitable for me. It is suitable for very few people. "

Karen Armstrong

" For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East. "

Karen Armstrong

" Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories. "

Karen Armstrong

" We are addicted to our egotism, our likes and dislikes and prejudices, and depend upon them for our own sense of identity. "

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. "

Karen Armstrong

" Pain is something that's common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren't engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester. "

Karen Armstrong

" The values of Islam are expressed by Muslims clearly. September 11 changed the world, and put Muslims on the spotlight. "

Karen Armstrong