"When violence becomes imbedded in a region, then this affects everything. It affects your dreams, your fantasies and relationships, and your religion becomes violent, too."

"A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do."

"Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity."

"Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage."

"We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."

"I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music."

"The beauty of the unknown is that the strength of a community lies in its compassion."

"Strength does not come from winning, but from knowing that the melody of life is composed of both highs and lows."