Arundhati Roy Quotes

As barbaric is we are, it's a miracle we haven't blown ourselves off the face of the earth so far.

Once started religious strife has a tendency to go on and on, to become permanent feuds.

In truth, I do not recollect in all the animal kingdom a single species but man which is eternally and systematically engaged in the destruction of its own species.

No kingdom has ever been so rent by civil wars as Christ's.

There is scarce any Principle, neither in the worship of God, nor humane sciences, from whence there may not spring dissentions, discords, reproaches, and by degrees war it self

The Catholics and Protestants … are occupied in nothing but cutting each other’s throats.

Religion-freedom-vengeance-what you will, A word's enough to raise mankind to kill.

Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.

There have never been so many civil wars as in the Kingdom of Christ.

It's obvious that humanity continues to be torn by religious violence.

Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.

Nothing so mystical. Human beings hunger for killing, that is all. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth.

The most terrifying things in the universe came from human minds.

All wars are civil ones; for it is still man spilling his own blood, tearing out his own bowels.

Humanity was drawn to turmoil and self-destruction as inevitably as the earth was drawn to complete its annual revolution of the sun.

Most humans recognize their ruin, but they carry on regardless.

[Marriage] is the merciless revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature.

I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.

The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare.

It seems to me that God is a convenient invention of the human mind

The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.

The human race has improved everything, but the human race.

More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason.

If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it. And no period of time can be happier or more prosperous, than those in which it is never regarded or heard of.

It seems that man's greatest natural enemy is the target.