religion Quotes

There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.

Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.

It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.

The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.

The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it's an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.