The more aggressive our ideologies become, the more aggressive our discourse whether it's in the United States, from Washington D.C., or whether it's from Tehran, or from some underground Al-Qaeda cell. The more aggressive that discourse is, the more people of moderate persuasion have to organize and speak a voice of compassion. That means to feel with the other.

I have a very sharp tongue, I'm very impatient, and it's a lifelong struggle.

My study of religion, which I regard in many ways as an art form, is a search for meaning.

Fundamentalists are not friends of democracy. And that includes your fundamentalists in the United States.

In order to always treat others, as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we have to learn about each other. Not just relying on an op-ed piece we may have read here, or a half-remembered interview on the television program there that happens to chime with our own views.

The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.

Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.