#fanaticism

There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there's poverty; there's political repression; there's gender apartheid - there's a sense of culture loss; there's religious fanaticism. ↗

— Lawrence Wright

#culture #despair #different #fanaticism #gender

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

— Salman Rushdie

#extremism #fanaticism #god #inhumanity #justification

The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism. ↗

— Reinhold Niebuhr

#claim #ends #fanaticism #god #our

From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step. ↗

— Denis Diderot

#fanaticism #only #step

[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy. ↗

— Jared Diamond

#death #fanaticism #radicalism #war #death

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions. It is the resistance offered to definite ideas by that vague bulk of people whose ideas are indefinite to excess. Bigotry may be called the appalling frenzy of the indifferent. This frenzy of the indifferent is in truth a terrible thing; it has made all monstrous and widely pervading persecutions. In this degree it was not the people who cared who ever persecuted; the people who cared were not sufficiently numerous. It was the people who did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack. There have come some persecutions out of the pain of a passionate certainty; but these produced, not bigotry, but fanaticism--a very different and a somewhat admirable thing. Bigotry in the main has always been the pervading omnipotence of those who do not care crushing out those who care in darkness and blood. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#fanaticism #ideas #moral-crusade #oppression #anger

Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity. ↗

— Edward Gibbon

#feelings #humanity

...history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines. ↗

— Paul Tillich

#fanaticism #love #faith

It is often said that mankind needs a faith if the world is to be improved. In fact, unless the faith is vigilantly and regularly checked by a sense of man's fallibility, it is likely to make the world worse. From Torquemada to Robespierre and Hitler the men who have made mankind suffer the most have been inspired to do so have been inspired to do so by a strong faith; so strong that it led them to think their crimes were acts of virtue necessary to help them achieve their aim, which was to build some sort of an ideal kingdom on earth. ↗

— David Cecil

#evil #faith #fanaticism #fundamentalism #good-intentions

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note. ↗

— Georges Bizet

#crime #evil #fanaticism #i #longer