Religious Quotes - page 100
A visionary leader seeks to empower others. They continue to search for truth while maintaining their principle-centered focus. Visionary leaders have a good balance between right-brain and leftbrain thinking. The right brain is more feminine, nurturing, intuitive and creative; the left-brain is more masculine and "physical,” interested more in results. Visionary leaders often produce a host of solutions for social, economic and other types of problems.
If we want visionary leaders, we must, of course, learn to recognize them and support them. Visionary leaders have great qualities, which they develop through their interest in values, intuition and partnership with others. They can bring spiritual culture to our religious and political lives. Mahatma Gandhi once said, "I must first be the change I want to see in my world.”.
Bhakti Tirtha Swami
There are two kinds of freedom to be found in our world: the freedom of desires, and the freedom from desires. Our modern Western culture only recognizes the first of these, freedom of desires. It then worships such a freedom by enshrining it at the forefront of national constitutions and bills of human rights. One can say that the underlying creed of most Western democracies is to protect their people's freedom to realize their desires, as far as this is possible. It is remarkable that in such countries people do not feel very free. The second kind of freedom, freedom from desires, is celebrated only in some religious communities. It celebrates contentment, peace that is free from desires. It is remarkable that in such abstemious communities like my monastery, people feel free.
Ajahn Brahm
You have two choices with Obama. You either believe that he is a man of Christ... or you think he's a liar. And I'm surprised by the number of atheist free thinkers that support Obama, and their argument is essentially, 'He's lying about being religious 'cause you have to do that to get elected.' It's a horrible reason to like somebody.
Penn Jillette
When 9/11 hit, the second thing I said to myself was, 'This really is what religious people do.' Those people flying the plane were very good, very pious, truly faithful believers. There's no other way to paint them. Of course, they are extremists by definition, but they certainly aren't going against Islam in any real way.
Penn Jillette
The history of religions reaches down and makes contact with that which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred. The history of religions can play an extremely important role in the crisis we are living through. The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.
Mircea Eliade
Political institutions and ideologies are the warty outgrowth of the religious thinking of the man; in a way responsible for the tragedy of mankind. We are slaves to our ideas and beliefs, and we torture ourselves in the hope of achieving something. All our experience, spiritual or otherwise, is the basic cause of our suffering... The body is not interested in anything "you" are interested in; that is the battle that is going on all the time.
U. G. Krishnamurti
Islam is my religion, but I believe my religion is my personal business. It governs my personal life, my personal morals. And my religious philosophy is personal between me and the God in whom I believe; just as the religious philosophy of these others is between them and the God in whom they believe. And this is best this way. Were we to come out here discussing religion, we'd have too many differences from the outstart and we could never get together.
Malcolm X
Atrocious deeds were done, in which religious passion was often the instrument, but policy was the motive.
Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians.
John W. Campbell
Rev. and Mrs. Moon boldly entered Moscow in April 1990 and had a one-on-one meeting in the Kremlin with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. This was another miracle to have occurred. Rev. Moon conveyed his support to Gorbachev of his policies of glasnost and perestroika. I was there to translate that extraordinary meeting. Rev. Moon persuaded Gorbachev to allow religious freedom, to allow God to enter the Soviet Union. In my opinion, this meeting was crucially important in the sight of God. It was, in a way, the beginning of a peaceful process of the demise of the Soviet empire. Rev. Moon indeed motivated Gorbachev in the direction of peaceful reform. The greatest miracle that occurred in this century was the liberation of the Soviet Union without nuclear war. The threat of nuclear war was the single greatest concern of Rev. Moon. He said, "Thank God, not a single nuclear weapon was used against mankind since 1945."
Bo Hi Pak
It was manifest that all persons who had learned that political science is an affair of conscience rather than of might or expediency, must regard their adversaries as men without principle, that the controversy between them would perpetually involve morality, and could not be governed by the plea of good intentions which softens down the asperities of religious strife. Nearly all the greatest men of the seventeenth century repudiated the innovation. In the eighteenth, the two ideas of Grotius, that there are certain political truths by which every state and every interest must stand or fall, and that society is knit together by a series of real and hypothetical contracts, became, in other hands, the lever that displaced the world. When, by what seemed the operation of an irresistible and constant law, royalty had prevailed over all enemies and all competitors, it became a religion. Its ancient rivals, the baron and the prelate, figured as supporters by its side.
John W. Campbell
