Karen Armstrong Quotes

Karen Armstrong (20)

Birth:	14th November, 1944
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Writer

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Today's Anniversary - 24th May

Births

• 1898 - Helen B. Taussig
• 1960 - Kristin Scott Thomas
• 1914 - Lilli Palmer
• 1873 - Leon Czolgosz
• 1958 - Wayne Williams

Deaths

• 1991 - Gene Clark
• 1997 - Edward Mulhare
• 1543 - Nicolaus Copernicus
• 1879 - William Lloyd Garrison
• 1964 - Thomas Vernor Smith

• Clashes and vitriol only make it worse. I think what we must learn to do is to read the imagery. We need to analyze and understand the subtext.

  Karen Armstrong

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Learn

• Fundamentalism represents a rebellion against modern secular society, the separation of religion and politics. Basically, fundamentalists want to drag religion and/or God from the sidelines to which they’ve been relegated in modern secular society and bring them back to center stage. And, in this, they’ve enjoyed considerable success in some ways, though in other ways… it can represent a defeat for religion.

  Karen Armstrong

  Topics in Society

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

  Karen Armstrong

  Topics in Democracy

• 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

• 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

• Of the millions of people we might call fundamentalists in all these major religions, only a tiny, tiny proportion take part in acts of terror or violence. The vast majority are simply trying to live what they regard as a good religious life in a world that seems increasingly hostile to religion.

  Karen Armstrong

• They taught that compassion brings you into the presence of God. They weren’t saying this simply because it sounds good. They said it because it works.

  Karen Armstrong

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

  Karen Armstrong

• The other day when I was driving over to Edina, there was a bald eagle that flew overhead on Highway 6. There’s even a nest documented on the Chariton River.

  Karen Armstrong

• It all depends on the weather. We’re doubting a large number this year because the rivers aren’t frozen.

  Karen Armstrong

• 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

• And sometimes it’s the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn’t belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

  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

• 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

• 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.

  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

• 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

• It is, therefore, a mistake to regard myth as an inferior mode of thought, which can be cast aside when human beings have attained the age of reason. Mythology is not an early attempt at history, and does not claim that its tales are objective fact. Like a novel, an opera or a ballet, myth is make-believe; it is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us to glimpse new possibilities by asking ‘what if?’ — a question which has also provoked some of our most important discoveries in philosophy, science and technology.

  Karen Armstrong

  Tags in Myth

• Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.

  Karen Armstrong

  Topics in Religion

  Tags in Ethics

• Each of the world religions has its own particular genius, its own special insight into the nature and requirements of compassion, and has something unique to teach us.

  Karen Armstrong

  Topics in Religion

  Tags in Diversity, Compassion