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“I like the relaxed way in which the Japanese approach religion. I think of myself as basically a moral person, but I'm definitely not religious, and I'm very tired of the preachiness and obsession with other people's behavior characteristic of many religious people in the United States. As far as I could tell, there's nothing preachy about Buddhism. I was in a lot of temples, and I still don't know what Buddhists believe, except that at one point Kunio said 'If you do bad things, you will be reborn as an ox.'

This makes as much sense to me as anything I ever heard from, for example, the Reverend Pat Robertson.”
― Dave Barry, Dave Barry Does Japan

“The difference between a modern artist and a Buddhist monk is in the approach. The artist goes into the void empt and returns with a souvenir, if you will. The monk approaches the void with a traditional body of knowledge and arrives at emptiness. Our world, no less than that of the monks, is full of junk that gets in the way of spiritual practice. The artist plays with the junk, the monk orders it into nothingness.”
― Andrei Codrescu, Wakefield

“We should not be trapped by appearances. There are people who call themselves Buddhist who in fact are not very Buddhist, because there is discrimination and dogmatism in them. They are less Buddhist than many Christians. There are many Christians who do not call themselves Buddhist, but they are more Buddhist than these "Buddhists." We have to learn to look in that way. There are enough Buddhists; we don't need to convert more people to Buddhism. The right attitude is not to encourage people to be uprooted from their own tradition. The right attitude is to urge them to go back to their tradition. With the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, concentration, and insight they should be able to do this.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Answers from the Heart Publisher: Parallax Press

“More so even than the followers of other "world religions," devout Buddhists are believed to pay scant attention to economic considerations. They give and receive selflessly, with their virtuosos—the monastic renunciates—owning only a minimum of possessions. Disconnected from the economies within which they operate, they rely instead on the laity's alms, donations, and general goodwill. A spirit of calculation is absent when believers give what they can spare while monks and nuns make do with what they receive, unbound by any sense of obligation. Economic matters are a secondary concern in a religion dedicated to the pursuit of enlightenment and compassion.”
― Christoph Brumann, Monks, Money, and Morality: The Balancing Act of Contemporary Buddhism

“Buddhists have always claimed the moral high ground and attempted, with more or less success, to maintain an exigent ideal of purity. Any spiritual practice is fated to confront the obstinate realities of human existence, however.”
― Bernard Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality

“There is no global authority to ascertain and to confirm "authentic" Buddhists. While Buddhist sanghas (monastic communities) have the power to defrock monks from their particular community, there is no global platform to survey all monks, much less an institution to assess the viability of Buddhist laity.”
― Michael Jerryson, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road: Buddhism, Politics, and Violence

“Buddhists may uphold principles of nonviolence, but employ heuristics to dismiss the relevance of particular lives.”
― Michael Jerryson, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road: Buddhism, Politics, and Violence

“The world first began to give real consideration to the Vietnamese problem and the role of the Buddhists only after the Venerable Thich Quang-Duc burned himself on Phan-dinh-Phung Street in Saigon on June 11, 1963, to call the attention of the world public to the sufferings of the Vietnamese people under Ngo Dinh Diem's oppressive regime.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire

“The Buddhists of Vietnam desire to mobilize the potential force of their religion in order to rebuild their society, and consequently they have carried Buddhism into every domain of life: culture, economics, politics, and social welfare. Such a revolutionary effort naturally requires time for its realization.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire

“Buddhists do not accept the argument that there are no choices except that between victory and surrender. The combination of a cessation of bombing, North and South, and of all positive military action by the United States, with the creation of an independent, nonmilitary government in South Vietnam, offers another possibility.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire