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" It's a great event to get outside and enjoy nature. I find it very exciting no matter how many times I see bald eagles. "

Karen Armstrong

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" Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem. "

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. "

Karen Armstrong

" Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God. "

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" 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

" After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think, how awful. "

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" 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

" Well, the idea of God as a supreme being means that he is simply like us, writ large, and just bigger and better, the end product of the series; whereas this divine personality that we meet in the Bible was, for centuries, regarded simply as a symbol of a greater transcendence that lay beyond it. "

Karen Armstrong

" I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions. "

Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong

" 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. "

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

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

Karen Armstrong

" A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do. "

Karen Armstrong

" At the beginning of the twentieth century, every single leading Muslim intellectual was in love with the west, and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France. "

Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong

" Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States. "

Karen Armstrong

" All religions are designed to teach us how to live, joyfully, serenely, and kindly, in the midst of suffering. "

Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong

" Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious concept. "

Karen Armstrong

" Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate. "

Karen Armstrong

" The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith. "

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

" Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders. "

Karen Armstrong

" In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do. "

Karen Armstrong

" Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death. "

Karen Armstrong

" Human beings have always been mythmakers. "

Karen Armstrong

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

Karen Armstrong