The first guy who came up with the concept of religion was sitting out under a tree. I'm sure of that.

It's fun being in Islamic countries to know there's only one religion. There's order. You wear a burqa. There's no choice. People are happy with that.

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light.

You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental mind-shaping driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.

People here argue about religion interminably but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout.

Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?

I think you can be cynical about religion on occasion and certainly skeptical about the degree to which some people use religion to manipulate other people.

There was a time when someone would get on a plane and request to move their seat just because the person sitting next to them was of a different ethnicity or religion or nationality. But I don't think my generation wants that. That's how it used to be.

Fashion is almost like a religion for me at least.