Zealotry Quotes

“Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.”
― Anne Rice, The Witching Hour

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.”
― Joseph Campbell

“A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.”
― Carl Sagan

“Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.”
― Robert Heinlein

“It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.”
― Anatole France

“Anyone who says he knows God's intention is showing a lot of very human ego.”
― Michael Crichton, Next

“Let eloquence be flung to the dogs rather than souls be lost. What we want is to win souls. They are not won by flowery speeches.”
― Charles Spurgeon

“There’s nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are right.”
― Michael Faraday

“Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.”
― Salman Rushdie

“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, The Fry Chronicles

“Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings.

I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he'll fight and die for it."

[As quoted in The New Yorker, April 25, 2011]”
― Francis Crick

“Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.”
― Norman G. Finkelstein, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“Moderation is a wiser policy than zealotry”
― Christopher Paolini, Brisingr

“During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other's candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town's few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?' It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“That's what you get,' he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, 'when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains.”
― K.W. Jeter

“As the questions grow harder and more complicated, people yearn for simpler answers, one-sentence answers, answers that point unhesitatingly to a culprit who can be blamed for all our suffering, answers that promise that if we only eradicate the villains, all our troubles will vanish.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage...

As chairman emeritus of the extreme right-wing National Organization for Marriage”
― Orson Scott Card

“Zealots are totally incapable of any emotion other than rage. It is an unalterable law that people who claim to care about the human race are utterly indifferent to the sufferings of individuals.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Last Word: An Autobiography

“Give a man with a death wish a bottle of whisky and a loaded gun, you get a dead body. Give a martyr a quote from scripture and a pocket full of
prayers and you get a room full of corpses.”
― Kevis Hendrickson

“Z is for zealotry: national pride like an infinite zipline, hyperdrive, the fastest way down.”
― Joshua Bennett, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“More and more commonly, the strongest public sentiment is one of profound loathing - subversive loathing of 'the hegemonic discourse,' Western loathing of the East, Eastern loathing of the West, secular loathing of believers, religious loathing of the secular. Sweeping, unmitigated loathing surges like vomit from the depths of this or that misery. Such extreme loathing is a component of fanaticism in all its guises.”
― Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

“Zealots, ideologues, and tyrants are usually the people who feel that free speech is dangerous because it challenges their power.”
― C.A.A. Savastano

“In every religion, among the people who believe in it and fight for it, there is one Francis of Assisi to a legion of Brother Arnulphs.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Narrenturm

“Between his own and Jehovah's enemies, a David knows no difference.”
― William James

“One cannot despise Christians and love Christ at the same time. Too many are fooled into the self-righteous notion that those who stand boldly in the faith are nothing more than religious zealots and Pharisees, and that they themselves are closer to Jesus by communing with the mockers.”
― Criss Jami