fanaticism

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

People who change their religion should face the death penalty.

There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.

Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.

It is also the irrational instinct of religionism, the vague yearning for something to worship__ reflection or shadow of the true devotional principle__hich prompts men to project a subjective image of the lower, personal mind, and to endow it with human attributes, and then to claim to receive "revelations" from it; and this__he image of the Beast, or unspiritual mind,__s their anthropomorphic God, a fabulous monster the worship of which has ever prompted men to fanaticism and persecution, and has inflicted untold misery and dread upon the masses of mankind, as well as physical torture and death in hideous forms upon the many martyrs who have refused to bend the knee to this Gorgonean phantom of the beast-mind of man. Truly, where the worshipers of this image of the Beast predominate, the man whose brow and hand are unbranded by this superstition, who neither thinks nor acts in accordance with it, suffers ostracism if not virulent persecution.

She could have rambled with all the fervor of a woman who had loved one entity for longer than most races live, and with the inviolable, unquestioned certainty found in dementia. There were references dated and sealed with meticulous care which she would have enthusiastically opened with the mirth of one proclaiming a lifetime of honors and awards. But that singular event was freshly disturbed; its pores still drifted on the faint zephyr of remembrance.

In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.

It is more difficult to undermine faith than knowledge, love succumbs to change less than to respect, hatred is more durable than aversion, and at all times the driving force of the most important changes in this world has been found less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses, but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drove them forward.

... [T]he other lesson history has taught us - that tyranny and oppression are no match for compassion ... that the fanatical shouts of the bullies of the world are invariably silenced by the unified voices of decency that rise up to meet them.

Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality . . . and by the sharpness of their insights. . . . But with successive readings one__ doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one__ first enthusiasm may all too easily turn to an equally exaggerated aversion. Of all such writers, one might say that one cannot imagine them as children. The more we read them, the more we become aware that something has gone badly wrong with their affective life; . . . it is not only impossible to imagine one of them as a happy husband or wife, it is impossible to imagine their having a single intimate friend to whom they could open their hearts.

Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men.

There are many instances in history of people who allow their skepticism to cut the nerve of moral effort, and there are numerous people, on the other hand, who are fierce crusaders at the price of fanaticism. In his political commitments the fanatic makes claims for his particular case which cannot be validated by either a transcendent Providence or a neutral posterity.

Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.

If a man happen to take it into his head to assassinate with his own hands, or with the sword of justice, those whom he calls heretics, that is, people who think, or perhaps only speak, differently upon a subject which neither party understands, he will be as much inclined to do this at one time as at another. Fanaticism never sleeps: it is never glutted: it is never stopped by philanthropy; for it makes a merit of trampling on philanthropy: it is never stopped by conscience; for it has pressed conscience into its service. Avarice, lust, and vengeance, have piety, benevolence, honour; fanaticism has nothing to oppose it.

Forget organized religions. Forget scriptures. Forget Gods, Fathers, Sons and Spirits. Forget all dogmas taught by the representatives of theoretical religion, and then only you shall be able to visualize the true core of religion.

The old sporadic fanaticism of religious hatred had been skillfully perverted into the cold, steady fanaticism of national hate.

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.