Holy Land Quotes

“Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I don't like either the word [hike] or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not 'hike!' Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It's a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, 'A la sainte terre', 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.”
― John Muir

“Many critics of the Crusades would seem to suppose that after the Muslims had overrun a major portion of Christendom, they should have been ignored or forgiven; suggestions have been made about turning the other cheek. This outlook is certainly unrealistic and probably insincere. Not only had the Byzantines lost most of their empire; the enemy was at their gates. And the loss of Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy, as well as a host of Mediterranean islands, was bitterly resented in Europe. Hence, as British historian Derek Lomax (1933-1992) explained, 'The popes, like most Christians, believed war against the Muslims to be justified partly because the latter had usurped by force lands which once belonged to Christians and partly because they abused the Christians over whom they ruled and such Christian lands as they could raid for slaves, plunder and the joys of destruction.' It was time to strike back.”
― Rodney Stark, God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades

“The Dominican Republic is my holy land, my Mecca.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“There does not exist any more a holy mountain or a holy city or holy land which can be marked on a map. The reason is not that God’s holiness in space has suddenly become unworthy of Him or has changed into a heathen ubiquity. The reason is that all prophecy is now fulfilled in Jesus, and God’s holiness in space, like all God’s holiness, is now called and is Jesus of Nazareth.”
― Karl Barth

“For a Christian to return to a Jewish territoriality is to deny fundamentally what has transpired in the incarnation. It is to deflect appropriate devotion to the new place where God has appeared in residence,
namely, in his Son. This explains why the New Testament applies to the person of Christ religious language formerly devoted to the Holy Land or the Temple. He is the new spatiality, the new locale where God may be met.”
― Gary Burge, Jesus and the Land: The New Testament Challenge to "Holy Land" Theology

“ I moved from the holy land (Israel) to the land of opportunities (USA)”
― Batya Maman - Sabag

“Religious practice in the Land of the Bible tends to encourage exclusivity and discrimination rather than love and magnanimity. There is no place like the Holy Land to make one cynical about religion.”
― Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape

“... the gods will feast on the smoke of rams and ewes that all these lovely people will offer them, on the Temple Mount three times promised, there where the heads of Palestinian suicide bombers take off for the skies, corks of divine champagne, during the celebration of the end of days, the last fireworks, prefigured by the explosions of war, and it’s no doubt only a question of patience before the universe decides to become infinitesimal again and sucks all these burning memories into nothingness…”
― Mathias Énard, Zone

“The Holy Land is everywhere”
― Jaco Strydom, Confessions oor kerkwees

“There is not a particular Holy Land; all land on Earth is Holy because without land we cannot exist! Stop calling only a particular place as a Holy Land! Replace your local and narrow mind with a universal and broad one! All land on Earth is Holy!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“With all my heart, I seek to reach the Holy Land.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Crossing the Jordan from east to west, Israel is a new humanity, restored to an Eden that has expanded to become a garden land. They're baptized in the Jordan as a priestly people, entering sacred territory, the holy land.”
― Peter J. Leithart, Baptism: A Guide to Life from Death

“Jerusalem is a city of unfinished projects.”
― Anthony Bale, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes

“Holy ground can look startlingly ordinary, especially when one’s standing on it.”
― Anthony Bale, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes

“This is the India of which I speak - the India which, as I said, is to me the Holy Land. For those who, though born for this life in a Western land and clad in a Western body, can yet look back to earlier incarnations in which they drank the milk of spiritual wisdom from the breast of their true mother - they must feel ever the magic of her immemorial past, must dwell ever under the spell of her deathless fascination; for they are bound to India by all the sacred memories of their past; and with her, too, are bound up all the radiant hopes of their future, a future which they know they will share with her who is their true mother in the soul-life.”
― Annie Besant

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land, till the children- exclaimed, ‘There goes a SainteTerrer,’ Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean….For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking