Quotes About Extremism

The wedding of Christianity or Judaism with nationalism is lethal.

The division in opinion on the use of the term (i.e - fascism) comes down to whether you believe that fascism became fascism only after a continent was destroyed and millions of people were exterminated in gas chambers, or whether you believe that fascism is an ideology that led to those high crimes - that can lead to those crimes - and that those who subscribe to it are fascists.

If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

Nessuna setta è tanto stupida o sanguinaria da non poter trovare un seguito. [...] E quella degli Apparentemente Normali è la più temibile.

I agree that it is not just the extremists who harbor bad thoughts or engage in bad acts, but they are usually the source of the polarization and try to keep education and communication of the main stream from moving forward.

The traditional religious right's failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school.

We have to understand how the extremists got the way they are. Without that kind of understanding, we'd never really get to know them. I put in nothing about their childhoods. But what I have put in is stuff about the weird symbiotic relationship between us and them.

The elevation of unity as the highest social value is a core tenet of fascism and all leftist ideologies.

For progressives fascist is a conservative who is winning an argument.

it would explain why extreme partisans are so stubborn, closed-minded, and committed to beliefs that often seem bizarre or paranoid. Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.

Ignorant people see everything in black and white—they rely heavily on the myth of pure evil—and they are strongly influenced by their own self-interest.

El partidismo extremo puede ser literalmente adictivo.

Atrocities committed in the name of religion are almost always commited against out-group members, or against the most dangerous people of all: apostates (who try to leave the group) and traitors (who undermine the group).

Humans can be turned into suicide bombers, but it takes a great deal of training, pressure, and psychological manipulation. It doesn't come naturally to us.)

Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.

Show me a political system without machine politics, and I'll show you confusion, fragmentation, and a drift toward ungovernable extremism.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. Blaise Pascal

In Gwoza, Nigeria, one of the survivors of a massacre by the Islamist group Boko Haram described to a reporter how the radicals calmly killed their fellow Muslims one by one. 'They told us they were doing God's work even though all the men they shot in front of me were Muslims. They seemed happy.'7

Zealots: Wild eyed persons afflicted with incurable certainty about the workings of the world, a certainty that can lead to violence when the world doesn't fit.

Phillip, who is congenitally incapable of moderation

Extremism catches hold when all hope is gone, when a human being has been stripped of everything except hatred.

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. "Patriotism" is its cult.

I have noticed that this kind of fanatic, like every other kind, is in two species: the species which too clearly thinks out its own insane theory, and the species which remains perfectly muddle-headed.