Pico Iyer Quotes

If people invited Muslims into their home every week by way of a TV show would go a long way to making people feel comfortable with Muslims and countering misconceptions about who we are. Plus, of course, that will make it easier for us to impose sharia law across America.

You take the best of our tradition as a start, and I'll take the best of Christianity ... From there we can build.

If a Jewish group sat down with a Christian conservative group, and there was a so-called Messianic Jew at the table, that would be the end of the meeting.

As a practicing Jew, I have studied with Christian teachers whom I respect for who they are and what they are, including their positive concern with Jews and Judaism.

The best way for people to understand each other's faith is to share experiences.

After my engagement with Muslim friends, I pray more than I used to pray. My prayer life has been enriched by my encounter with some Muslims, encouraged by their devotion and also enriched by the ways in which they pray. Have I compromised in this way at all? No, to the contrary, I've gone deeper in my faith and I think my love for God has been deepened and made more intelligent in a sense, more rich by that very encounter.

We can and should investigate and learn from the wisdom in other religions.

People have to be exposed to Muslims, just experience Muslims; talk to them. Reach out, read about Islam, try to find out about it.

Religions have been universal in the sense that all the people we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless.... The older apologists for Christianity seem to have been better advised than some modern ones in condemning every religion but one as an impostor, as at bottom some kind of demon worship or at any rate a superstitious figment.

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

It's always interesting about God because it's like all of the religions in the world say that they pray to the same God, and yet they ask that same one God to divide itself up and agree with this one and fight against that one.

I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.

I have worked hard to build relationships between Jewish people and black people.

I am very grateful to our Muslim population. One of the things we've been doing is stepping up our inter-faith dialogue with the Muslim population. And I think that helped very much in their support for me.

Despite differences of faith or even the occasional collisions between them, Egypt is united.

It therefore become essential for the future of Judaism itself that its advancement should be correlated with a similar effort to advance the cause of religion generally.

I can now say that the more I learnt about Islam, the more tolerant I became.

My church is the world! I want to bring the gospel to as broad and as interesting an audience as possible.

If God wanted, he could have created all mankind as one religion. He created many different ways so we will cooperate.

Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity.

Moslems are not just a bunch of nuts and whackos .... these are people with whom we are simply out of touch.

I fully believe that our respective religious traditions - Islam and Catholicism - have the necessary resources to overcome past and present misunderstandings and to foster mutual friendship and understanding between our peoples. I am aware, as well, that collaboration does not imply giving up our distinct religious identities, but is rather a journey toward new discoveries, growth and self-respect.

We need the help of Muslims to defeat the terrorists—so we have to care what they think [about us].

I was raised fundamentalist Christian, and now I'm not that. It was not an act of rebellion or anything. For me, it was about being in a line of work where I was meeting so many different people and feeling like they all had legitimate points of view that I needed to consider and occasionally these were at odds with ideas that I was raised with.

Interreligious dialogue is extremely important for religious people as well as secular people or non-believers. They should participate, and they should be encouraged to have interreligious dialogue, because dialogue is a channel or an instrument to promote intimacy between individual.