Adora Svitak Quotes

Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change.

When African-Americans come to France, the French show them more consideration than they would show an African or a Black Caribbean. When African-Americans come to France, the French people are like, 'Oh, wow. Oh my God.' But if it's an African, they're like, 'Whatever.' It's all because of the past, because of our history.

God's love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

Mr. Speaker, I am deeply concerned that many regions of this world are suffering from the effects of armed conflicts with religious aspects. I believe that the differences of faith are not the real reason for these conflicts.

It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes.

The first line in the first 'Gasland' is: 'I'm not a pessimist. I've always had a great deal of faith in people that we won't succumb to frenzy or rage or greed. That we'll figure out a solution without destroying the things that we love.' I have not lost that sense.

Ethnic divisions can definitely be exacerbated by a lack of natural resources, but those tensions become violent when people manipulate them for their own political gain.

In the early '90s, I was disillusioned after the blasts and riots in Mumbai. I was in college and started thinking that religion was the root cause of all these evils. While my father told me not to blame religion because of a few bad people, I wasn't convinced. The faith was restored after I started writing my first book.

I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.

How do we stop ourselves from blowing each other up because we think that God wants us to blow each other up.

The Puritans' greatest concern seems to have been to establish a government of the church more consistent with the Scriptures, and a government of the state more agreeable to the dignity of human nature, than any they had seen in Europe, and to transmit such a government down to their posterity, with the means of securing and preserving it forever.

The borders of Islam are bloody.

I don't think there's any religion we can consider an enemy. There is no religion that calls for killing and hating and fighting. Muslims can be as peaceful [as we are], and even today I'm not sure all of them are necessarily very extreme or very violent. It has nothing to do with religion; it has to do with the ones who use the name of religion for their own ambitions. I don't know any lord in heaven who declared that the best solution is to kill everybody who is against me.

If my ancestors had been Muslims in a country conquered by Christian armies, instead of Christians in a country conquered by the forces of Islam, I do not think that they would have allowed to live in their towns and villages, retaining their own religion, for over a thousand years.

Secularism is how we handled religious conflicts that had plunged our country into a bloodbath.

When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.

Modernity is a shifting entity, not easily defined. Exactly the same is true of empire.

Using food as a way of understanding empire is highly effective. Food knows no barriers of race, gender or even time.

History will tell you that borders are not inevitable, they hardly existed at the end of the 19th century.

We have to support truth and reconciliation and some form of justice.

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

For the vast majority of mankind's history, economic activity consisted of finding energy and using energy.

It's our human nature to explore. Tens of thousands of years ago, our species walked out of Africa, traveling far and wide across the entire planet, from the Arctic to the tip of Tierra Del Fuego, making us the most geographically diversified species on Earth.

Even though we look at the past through the lens of distance and think that because people are wearing different clothes or have different technology, their experiences are different, it's all the same, right? Our experience of love and sex and death are the same in any time period.