Quotes About Religious Violence

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

Thomas Keating

#2. I show how much of the wars of religion involved Catholics killing Catholics, Lutherans killing Lutherans, and Catholic-Protestant collaboration. (Page 10 The Myth of Religious Violence)

William Cavanaugh

#3. Depictions or expressions of sex, violence, crime are all permitted virtually without limit; but religion, it seems, never.No wonder many in America seem to believe that the court has become one more inclined to protect pornography than to protect religious expression.

John Cornyn

#4. Instead of more violence why isn't there a meeting of religious leaders. It's all got to be dialogue - that's the only way. Get everybody from each religion together and say 'Listen, this can't go on. Why do we have all this hatred?'

Elton John

#5. Secularists argue that differences of religion were the chief cause of violence in our history - conveniently overlooking violent clashes of region, race, and class, not the least of which was the bloodiest war in history until that time, the Civil War.

Stephen V Monsma

#6. Religion doesn't divide the society. The humans reading the wrong books to understand religion, do.

Abhijit Naskar

#7. The society with lots of open disagreement and social conflict is the one surging with power in art, science, commerce, constructive social reform, and (most of all) religious revival; the hushed-up society where everyone is afraid to say what he thinks is on the brink of violence and collapse.

Greg Forster

#8. The line between actual killing and verbal, symbolic, or imaginary violence is thin and permeable. The threat of violence is a method of forceful coercion, even if no blood is actually shed.

John J. Collins

#9. The real Jihad is an internal process, not an external one.

Abhijit Naskar

#10. Whether a religion is of peace or violence should be defined by the actions of its people, not by some books.

Abhijit Naskar

#11. For the sake of peace, religious beliefs must never be allowed to be abused in the cause of violence and war.

Pope Francis

#12. More violence does not necessarily equate with greater religious conviction.

Maajid Nawaz

#13. The dangerous enemies of your species are fundamentalism, intolerance, separatism, extremism, hostility and prejudicial fear, be it religious, atheistic or political.

Abhijit Naskar

#14. Needless to say, if the Arab-Israeli conflict is about interstate disputes and the need to resolve the future of the West Bank and Gaza, it can be solved; if it is a religious conflict, nothing but violence is ahead.

Elliott Abrams

#15. It is intolerable that the world's religions - founded on the values of love and compassion - should provide a pretext for the expression of hatred and violence.

Federico Mayor Zaragoza

#16. The problem is not religion or God. The actual problem is authoritarianism, mixed with the desire to angrily impose one's personal apparently idealistic beliefs on others.

Abhijit Naskar

#17. Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench.

Baha'u'llah

#18. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine.

Jonathan Swift

#19. Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem.

Karen Armstrong

#20. I condemn all incidents of violence where religious minorities were targeted, no religious group can incite violence ... my government will ensure there is complete freedom of faith.

Narendra Modi

#21. In a much larger sense, the problem of Sabah is directly influenced by the duplicity of imperial Britain. For whatever devious reason, the dismantling of the British empire created divisions and violence due to ethnic and religious differences.

F. Sionil Jose

#22. Examples of goodness that know no ethnic, religious, racial, or political bounds are important documents of war, as they also represent an axis around which a healthy future can be constructed after the atrocities have halted.

Dario Spini

#23. Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.

Haruki Murakami

#24. When has religion ever been unifying? Religion has introduced many wars in this world, enough bloodshed and violence.

Elie Wiesel

#25. In every religion, there are those who would drape themselves in the mantle of belief and faith only to distort it's most sacred teachings - preaching intolerance and resorting to violence.

Hillary Clinton

#26. A religion that demands absolutely irrefutable obedience, is anything but religion.

Abhijit Naskar

#27. Because we hold it for 'a fundamental and undeniable truth', that religion or 'the duty which we owe to our Creator' and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.

James Madison

#28. To yield to the threat or actual use of violence is a surrender of one's self respect and religious conviction.

Mahatma Gandhi

#29. More men and women were slaughtered in a couple of weeks of the terror of the atheistic French Revolution than in a century of the Inquisition.

Michael Coren

#30. I knew I wanted to write on religious themes when I was a GI in World War II. I saw and experienced so much violence that I thought I could express my outrage best with music.

Dave Brubeck

#31. The world is an increasingly dangerous, troubled place. There are nations that seem to be ungovernable. Nations where violence and religious combat are as common as the sunrise.

Mike Barnicle

#32. Priesthood, Imamhood, Pundithood often come hand in hand with tyranny.

Abhijit Naskar

#33. If you don't act now, the day is not far, that this beautiful planet of yours, which you call home, shall be turned into a dry barren wasteland by the blood-sucking fundamentalists.

Abhijit Naskar

#34. Violence does not build up the kingdom of God, the kingdom of humanity. On the contrary, it is a favorite instrument of the Antichrist, however idealistic its religious motivation may be. It serves, not humanity, but inhumanity.

Pope Benedict XVI

#35. The assertion that Americans love violence and bathe in it daily is a self-serving lie promulgated by fundamentalist religious types and America's propaganda-savvy gun-pimps. It's believed by people who don't read novels, play video games, or go to many movies

Stephen King

#36. Religion comes not where reign fundamentalism and authoritarianism.

Abhijit Naskar

#37. I was trying to foment a little dissension.' He paused. 'No, that's too flippant. How about trying to make the system less warlike - injecting a little love?' He snorted. 'Through violence, of course, like all religious reformers.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#38. The entire idea of sin, is based on books of the dead people. It is a sociological invention founded on textual fanaticism.

Abhijit Naskar

#39. The antitheist is quick to excoriate all religious belief by generically laying the blame at the door of all who claim to be religious, without distinction. By the same measure, why is there not an equal enthusiasm to distribute blame for violence engendered by some of the irreligious?

Ravi Zacharias

#40. If you look at any religious description of hell, it is the same as human society, the way we dream. Hell is a place of suffering, a place of fear, a place of war and violence, a place of judgment and no justice, a place of punishment that never ends.

Miguel Ruiz

#41. Mankind, not womankind, has slaughtered more humans in the name of God and Religion than for any other reason.

Abhijit Naskar

#42. I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.

Montesquieu

#43. When you move to a new environment with cultural and social characteristics different from your own, it is only logical, that you loosen some of the knots of your religious doctrines, to embrace the new and vivid environment as much as you wish to be embraced by the environment.

Abhijit Naskar

#44. Religious fanaticism has clearly produced, and in all probability will continue to produce, enormous amounts of bickering, fighting, violence, bloodshed, homicide, feuds, wars, and genocide.

Albert Ellis

#45. Islam is not unusual in having a tradition of martyrs. What is unique to Islam is the tradition of murderous martyrdom, in which the individual martyr simultaneously commits suicide and kills others for religious reasons.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

#46. The plan was always to come to America, because Pakistan's a scary place. They don't have religious freedom. It's very poor, and there's a lot of violence and corruption.

Kumail Nanjiani

#47. Forget organized religions. Forget scriptures. Forget Gods, Fathers, Sons and Spirits. Forget all dogmas taught by the representatives of theoretical religion, and then only you shall be able to visualize the true core of religion.

Abhijit Naskar

#48. To fight the violence we must be brave, hold on strong to the love God gave.

Elton John

#49. A great woe underpinning the sorrows of the world today is this: so many people think they are far better than others and they are too righteous than others, and they know far better than others, and such thoughts give them reasons for an otherwise action!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#50. Some of the worst violence in the world today between estranged religious and ethnic groups happens not on the battlefields. It happens smack in the middle of living rooms and between people who share a lot, who have a lot in common.

Miroslav Volf