It is people who are violent, rather than "religions"; and since we secularised our politics we have had two major world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - none of which were inspired by religion. If we want to understand the dangers of our world, we can no longer accept the old received ideas.

You have to get into the water and learn against what seems to be the law gravity to float and dancing, or athletics takes you years before you develop a skill. But if you work at it, practicing daily, you can enable your body to do things that are utterly impossible to an untrained physic.

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.

If we don't manage to implement the Golden Rule globally, so that we treat all peoples, wherever and whoever they may be, as though they were as important as ourselves, I doubt that we'll have a viable world to hand on to the next generation.

In the holy city of Mecca, violence of any kind was forbidden. From the moment they left home, pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, to swat an insect or speak an angry word, a discipline that introduced them to a new way of living.

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

He [Aristotle] pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any facts 'but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition.' Hence his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth.