Quotes About Zealotry

A man who loves his god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

Inventive rhetoric is characteristic of true believers.

I'd have found it amusing enough, I dare say, if I hadn't been irritated by the thought that these irresponsible Christian zealots were only making things harder for the Army and Company, who had important work to do. It was all so foolish and unnecessary—the heathen creeds, for all their nonsensical mumbo-jumbo, were as good as any for keeping the rabble in order, and what else is religion for? In

The average religious person has their beliefs, but they're not trying to get people fired who don't have their beliefs. But zealots do do that. It's not enough for them to believe it; they can't tolerate other people who don't believe what they believe, and they have this absolute certainty that they're right.

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.

A fanatic who is willing to die for his cause thinks nothing of killing you for his cause.

Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved us all a lot of trouble . . .

Fanatics,' Didier mused, ignoring the rebuke, 'always seem to have the same scrubbed and staring look about them. They have the look of people who do not masturbate, but who think about it almost all the time.

Fanaticism means that if you're not against me, you're against me.

Fanatics always seem to have the same scrubbed and staring look about them. They have the look of people who do not masturbate, but who think about it almost all the time.

Fanatics, of all kinds, all have the same scrubbed and staring look about them, the look of people who do not masturbate, but who think about it almost all the time.

No matter how good the idea, there's always an advocate extreme enough to deter people.

The single axioms of the ideologically possessed are gods, served blindly by their proselytizers.

The difference between a cult and a religion, of course, lies in extremity.

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

The most rabidly religious people are the most rabidly evil.

The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

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.

Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind

Wesel devoted these months to assembling a Satan's brood of dedicated killers and systematically training them to a supreme pitch of efficiency. … The murderous intensity common to all its members could only have been generated by the interaction of several factors, among them a power-crazed and inflexible determination to destroy at the bidding of a higher authority. ? Hans Hellmut Kirst

Make someone a devout, fanatical anything, and his brain turns to mulch.

There is no cause so hopeless, no creed so mad, no idea so ludicrous that it will not attract some believers

We shouldn't let anti-science zealotry shut down the ability to produce low-cost, quality food for billions across the globe.

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.