#extremism

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#extremism #fanaticism #god #inhumanity #justification

Most governments are pragmatic, most people are logical. There are pockets of extremism in Israel, in the U.S. and in the Muslim world. But we have to fight them with reason, with logic and with compassion. ↗

— Al-Waleed bin Talal

#extremism #fight #governments #israel #logic

We humans are naturally disposed to worship gods and heroes, to build our pantheons and valhallas. I would rather see that impulse directed into the adoration of daft singers, thicko footballers and air-headed screen actors than into the veneration of dogmatic zealots, fanatical preachers, militant politicians and rabid cultural commentators. ↗

— Stephen Fry

#religious-extremism #zealotry #nature

You know,” said Jehangir, breaking the silence, “it's only Muslims who use the term 'innovation' to mean something bad. ↗

— Michael Muhammad Knight

#extremism #fundamentalism #islam #religion #religion

Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all. ↗

— John W. Gardner

#conviction #diagnosis #excessively #extremism #identifiable

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#extremism #fanaticism #god #inhumanity #justification

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#zealotry #religion

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do. ↗

— Richard Dawkins

#religion #religious-extremism #religion

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#falwell #islamism #jihad #masochism #pat-robertson

Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong. ↗

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

#conservatives #democrats #extremism #liberalism #liberals