A Quote by Ian Lustick

Democracies domesticate religious groups to become political players. That's how it works.

Ian Lustick

Quote Topics

Become Groups How Players Political Religious Works

Quote Author

Ian Lustick
American - Historian
Born: 1949

If you look back at history or you look at any place in the world where religious groups or ethnic groups or racial groups or political groups are killing each other, or families have been feuding for years and years, you can see - because you're not particularly invested in that particular argument - that there will never be peace until somebody softens what is rigid in their heart.

Pema Chodron

There's a term, agape, you hear used a lot with charismatic religious groups, that it's this more pure love of caring, of sharing of concern and understanding. I think players and teams have to come to that at some point in the season to become successful. Maybe not "personal friends," but they become teammates at the highest level of that term.

Phil Jackson

Radical groups can become legitimate political players in the democratic process if they accept core democratic principles and abandon the use of force as a political tool. Or they can maintain armed terrorist militias in order to threaten their neighbors and intimidate their people. The international community should not allow them to do both.

Tzipi Livni

The US empowered the Shi'a Islamic political groups and marginalised a big part of Iraq who were recognised as Sunni people. It was only to be expected that the next step would be for the sectarian religious dynamics to surface, for one religious group to be fighting another religious group.

Yanar Mohammed

The U.K. has some of the best protections in law for religious groups in the world. They aren't perfect, but they provide a strong basis for religious groups to be free from fear of discrimination. I'm proud of this because it underpins what is decent about our country.

Sadiq Khan

I think the story of the Christian faith is how you can become more deeply and fully human, not how you can become religious. And I don't see any indication that being religious makes you more moral.

John Shelby Spong

Jews have not only become equal citizens in Western democracies, they have become leading citizens. And, of course, the reestablishment of the State of Israel has given Jews a political presence in the world they have not had since biblical times.

David Novak

One of the more important things the Bernie Sanders campaign did is reach people who are political but not electorally political. They're political in either non-profits or community groups, but didn't see how important it was to get involved in electoral politics.

Zephyr Teachout

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

Philip K. Dick

The vast majority of Muslims living here are peaceful citizens. Unfortunately, however, we also see religious and political fanaticism among Muslim groups in Germany.

Otto Schily

The practical core of democracy, defined functionally, is the peaceful exchange of power between different groups of powerful political players arranged in parties.

Noah Feldman

In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.

Carl Sagan

Lebanon, of course, is a country with great problems. Traditionally, they have religious-national groups or ethnic-national groups. They have the Druses. Even the two Moslem sects, the Sunnis and the Shiites, are apart. Then they have the armed groups. Everybody's got a private army.

Menachem Begin

I'm very wary of large groups of people getting together and trying to believe the same thing. It never seems to end well, whether it's political or religious or whatever.