Best quotes by Karen Armstrong on Religion

Checkout quotes by Karen Armstrong on Religion

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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.

  - 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Karen Armstrong
  

• ‟ There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.

  - 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Karen Armstrong