Life & Wisdom Quote by Karen Armstrong

Armstrong’s line lands like a rebuke disguised as a shrug: of course compassion is praised, but it’s rarely rewarded. The power here is the friction between “virtue,” a word with moral shine, and “popular,” a word from the marketplace. She’s not arguing that compassion is absent; she’s pointing out that it’s structurally unfashionable in public life, where attention, outrage, and certainty travel faster than patient care.

The intent is corrective. Armstrong, a writer steeped in comparative religion and the ethics that religions claim to teach, is calling out the gap between what societies say they value and what they actually incentivize. Compassion asks for time, proximity, and the humiliating admission that other people’s pain might complicate our tidy narratives. Popularity, by contrast, loves clean villains, quick fixes, and the warm glow of being right.

The subtext is political without naming parties: compassion is costly. It can look like softness, or worse, like disloyalty to your team. It requires you to imagine the interior life of someone you’d prefer to reduce to a symbol: the addict, the refugee, the criminal, the ideological opponent. That imaginative labor is precisely what mass culture tries to spare us.

Context matters because Armstrong’s career has been an extended argument that empathy is not sentimentalism but discipline. Read this way, the sentence is less a lament than a warning: a society can be loudly moral and quietly cruel, and still feel good about itself.