Religious Fanatics Quotes

It is the lot of God's ministers not only to suffer opposition at the hand of a wicked world, but also to see the patient indoctrination of many years quickly undone by such religious fanatics. This hurts more than the persecution of tyrants. We are treated shabbily on the outside by tyrants, on the inside by those whom we have restored to the liberty of the Gospel, and also by false brethren. But this is our comfort and our glory, that being called of God we have the promise of everlasting life. We look for that reward which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man. ~ Martin Luther

I Am More Spiritual Than Religious; Besides I Am Not A Fanatic ~ Aamir Khan

[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

A multiverse hurtling toward an inevitable heat death 100 trillion years in the future. An alien race of religious fanatics bent on absorbing all sentient life. Another alien race fighting back. A world of magicians living in secret. And himself, a contractor, a human Vorid that could absorb his enemies and grow stronger. All in less than 24 hours. And here he was, relaxing on his roof. Maybe video games really did desensitize you to this stuff. Except if he died, he wasn't going to pop back to life. ~ Andrew Ball

Listening to someone who brews their own beer is like listening to a religious fanatic talk about the day he saw the light. ~ Ross Murray

No, that's not the style of these people,' explained Maxy. 'You shouldn't think of these Bolsheviks as modern politicians. They were religious fanatics. Their Marxism was fanatical; their fervour was semi-Islamic; and they saw themselves as members of a secret military-religious order like the medieval Crusaders or the Knights Templar. They were ruthless, amoral and paranoid. They believed that millions would have to die to create their perfect world. Family, love and friendship were nothing compared to the holy grail. People died of gossip at Stalin's court. For a man like Satinov, secrecy was everything. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who - in their grudge against the traditional "opium of the people" - cannot bear the music of the spheres. The Wonder of nature does not become smaller because one cannot measure it by the standards of human morals and human aims. ~ Albert Einstein

Some 'separation' zealots would expunge any vestige of religious observance in public schools. Many of the same anti-religious fanatics would like to wipe out of existence all church-related schools, by regulation or taxation, so that universal ignorance of the life of spirit should prevail. ~ Russell Kirk

Terrorism has made our world an integrated community in a new and frightening way. Not merely the activities of our neighbors, but those of the inhabitants of the most remote mountain valleys of the farthest-flung countries of our planet, have become our business. We need to extend the reach of the criminal law there and to have the means to bring terrorists to justice without declaring war on an entire country in order to do it. For this we need a sound global system of criminal justice, so justice does not become the victim of national differences of opinion. We also need, though it will be far more difficult to achieve, a sense that we really are one community, that we are people who recognize not only the force of prohibitions against killing each other but also the pull of obligations to assist one another. This may not stop religious fanatics from carrying out suicide missions, but it will help to isolate them and reduce their support. ~ Peter Singer

The principal sponsors of the terrorists are not religious fanatics. "Palestine's Yasser Arafat, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and Syria's Assad family have made themselves the icons of Islamism despite the fact that they are well-known atheists who live un-Muslim lives and have persecuted unto death the Muslim movements in their countries." ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

A questionnaire! Such an obvious solution. A purpose-built, scientifically valid instrument incorporating current best practice to filter out the time wasters, the disorganised, the ice-cream discriminators, the visual-harassment complainers, the crystal gazers, the horoscope readers, the fashion obsessives, the religious fanatics, the vegans, the sports watchers, the creationists, the smokers, the scientifically illiterate, the homeopaths, leaving, ideally, the perfect partner, or realistically, a manageable shortlist of candidates. ~ Graeme Simsion

Let's face it. There are good people and bad people everywhere. Illiteracy, poor education, wars, greed , corruption and similar factors were responsible for the problems in both India and Pakistan. Religious fanatics benefited from these factors and developed formidable socio-political strongholds in both countries. ~ Vivek Pereira

In some ways I feel sorry for racists and for religious fanatics, because they so much miss the point of being human, and deserve a sort of pity. But then I harden my heart, and decide to hate them all the more, because of the misery they inflict and because of the contemptible excuses they advance for doing so. ~ Christopher Hitchens

If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you'll find it. ~ Stephen Fry

America was founded by the refuse of the religious fanatics of England, these undesirable elements that came over on the Mayflower. Ignorant, religious fanatics who land here and abuse the Indians. ~ Frank Zappa

Feel eternity around you. Not as an idea, not as a nice intellectualization, but to really feel it; not to be some religious fanatic who's strung out on some weird idea of salvation to the exclusion of common sense. ~ Frederick Lenz

The advantages of a propaganda that constantly "adds the power of organization" to the feeble and unreliable voice of argument, and thereby realizes, so to speak, on the spur of the moment, whatever it says, are obvious beyond demonstration. Foolproof against arguments based on a reality which the movements promised to change, against a counterpropaganda disqualified by the mere fact that it belongs to or defends a world which the shiftless masses cannot and will not accept, it can be disproved only by another, a stronger or better, reality.

It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian propaganda becomes visible. Without the force of the movement, its members cease at once to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still were ready to sacrifice their lives. The moment the movement, that is, the fictitious world which sheltered them, is destroyed, the masses revert to their old status of isolated individuals who either happily accept a new function in a changed world or sink back into their old desperate superfluousness. The members of totalitarian movements, utterly fanatical as long as the movement exists, will not follow the example of religious fanatics and die the death of martyrs (even though they were only too willing to die the death of robots). Rather they will quietly give up the movement as a bad bet and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former fiction regains enough strength to establish another ~ Hannah Arendt

The religious fanatic drew a small circle and left me, the infidel, outside it. However, I, with the help of love, won over him - I drew a large circle and included him. ~ Ameen Rihani

You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to surmise that war has a perverse appeal for the human race, nor is the attraction limited to religious fanatics committing mass murder and suicide for the greater glory of God. ~ Ellen Willis

I've thought it from time to time myself. Stupidly simple. There has to be something to all this. There has to be! So many missing pieces. The more you consider it, the more atheists begin to sound like religious fanatics. But I think it's a delusion. It is all process and nothing more. ~ Anne Rice

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'. ~ Richard Dawkins

This administration has forbidden us to describe our enemies properly and clearly: they are Radical Islamists. They are not alone, and are allied with countries and groups who, though not religious fanatics, share their hatred of the West, particularly the United States and Israel. ~ Michael T. Flynn

Jeremy Spencer, always religious to an obsessive degree, had disappeared hours before a show while on tour with Fleetwood Mac in the U.S. According to band lore, it had happened right here in Los Angeles in 1971. He walked out of the band's hotel room announcing, "Just going out to a bookstore", and never returned. Somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard he climbed into a van belonging to members of a religious group who called themselves the Children of God. After a long, frantic search involving the police and close friends, Jeremy was finally tracked down to a ramshackle house that was the headquarters of the Children of God. He'd become a full-fledged member of a religious group that some would label a cult. And there he stayed. He refused to come back to either Fleetwood Mac or his wife and children, choosing instead to join a group of religious fanatics and leave all that he had ever known behind. And now he was standing in ~ Carol Ann Harris

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not. ~ Eric Hoffer

You cannot defend human rights without fighting religious fanatics - regardless of one's own religious experience - it is unavoidable. Why? Because they are the ones who take issue with how other people live their lives instead of minding their own business. ~ Christina Engela

There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there's something ineffable going on within the human mind, or you can believe we just don't understand what quality in a mind is yet, even though we might someday. Either of those opinions allows one to distinguish quantity and quality. In order to confuse quantity and quality, you have to reject both possibilities. The mere possibility of there being something ineffable about personhood is what drives many technologists to reject the notion of quality. They want to live in an airtight reality that resembles an idealized computer program, in which everything is understood and there are no fundamental mysteries. They recoil from even the hint of a potential zone of mystery or an unresolved seam in one's worldview. This desire for absolute order usually leads to tears in human affairs, so there is a historical reason to distrust it. Materialist extremists have long seemed determined to win a race with religious fanatics: Who can do the most damage to the most people? ~ Jaron Lanier

It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics. ~ Denise Caruso

Religious fanatics and Political fanatics, yet we want Nigeria to be developed.

A nation filled with blind people.

See developed nations dealing on facts and figures, discovering cures for diseases, building people with great minds through science, proposing theories, debating over them, testing them and proving them thus using such theories to invent and innovate technologies.

Here in Nigeria, we are deceiving ourselves, fasting and praying. Pointing fingers at people who won't make heaven yet they don't wanna die.

A place where asking questions is a crime and a sin. They act as if they are holier than the pope.

Greedy and blind people. ~ OMOSOHWOFA CASEY

Ashcroft went on to say that our way of life is being threatened by a group of radical religious fanatics who are armed and dangerous. And then he called for prayers in the schools and an end to gun control. ~ Jay Leno

Very few minds are strictly normal, and all religious fanatics are marked with abnormalities of various sorts. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Only religious fanatics and totalitarian states equate morality with legality. ~ Linus Torvalds

There are photographic fanatics, just as there are religious fanatics. They buy a so-called candid camera there is no such thing: it's the photographer who has to be candid, not the camera. ~ Weegee

Then in a moment, in that vast space of rocks and sky and scorching sun, I understood that he had not meant religious faith, not exactly. He was not urging me to become a Muslim or to believe in one interpretation of God rather than another. He knew me for what I was, an old, cold, cautious scientist. That was what I was then. And he was simply pointing out to me the first step to take. The word he had used was faith, but what he meant was belief. The first step was simple: it was to believe in belief itself. I had just taken that step. At long last I understood.

I had belief. I did not know, or for the moment care, what exactly it was I had to believe in. I only knew that belief in something was the first step away from believing in nothing, the first step away from a world which only recognised what it could count, measure, sell or buy. The people here still had that innocent power of belief: not the angry denial of other people's belief of religious fanatics, but a quiet affirmation. That was what I sensed here, in this land and in this place, which made it so different from home. It was not the clothes, not the language, not the customs, not the sense of being in another century. It was none of these. It was the pervading presence of belief.

I believed in belief. I didn't exactly feel as if I was on the road to Damascus, and I was aware I could not think straight because of the power of the sun, but now I knew what the Yemen salmon project was all ab ~ Paul Torday

A religious fanatic is somebody who knows Jesus Christ better than you do. ~ Jim Kaat

There is no fanatic like a religious fanatic. ~ Agatha Christie

There is no doubt that religious fanatics have done more to prejudice the cause they affect to advocate than have its opponents. ~ Hosea Ballou

In 1979, while Saudi Arabia was in the midst of a process of
liberalization, a group of religious fanatics seized the Grand Mosque in
Mecca. The Masjid al-Haram houses the kaaba, considered the holiest sitefor Muslims. This incident was a national trauma and transformative for al Saud, who reacted to it with an increased religious traditionalism enforced by the government and spearheaded by the ulama. Ambassador Smith credited a clear transformation to what occurred in 1979. "Saudi Arabia started going ultraconservative after the takeover of the Holy Mosque. ~ Ellen R. Wald

Religious fanatics are the worst. They're basically impossible to bargain with, they accept no outside opinion about anything, and they departed from reality well before you met them. ~ Gene Doucette

The most crazed religious fanatic argues in more calm and reasoned tones than liberals responding to statistics on concealed-carry permits. ~ Ann Coulter

You and Dad are really the wrecking ball of all of our teenage runaway fantasies. Why couldn't you jerks go and be crack addicts or religious fanatics so we could have excuses to live on the wide open road? - email from Lily ~ Candace Allan

That Massachusetts Bay Colony had been set up in England as a corporation, enabling one hundred white male religious fanatics to elect their leader to rule in a completely totalitarian way. ~ Larry Kramer

The bigger the government, the more the corruption. It's almost never mentioned, and it might be the biggest of the ten principles that I am speaking of ... Do you know who has created the greatest evils of history? Big governments. Big SECULAR governments. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, all big States. Why would anybody trust the big state? It's amazing how many callers have imbued the college message that more people have been killed by religion than anything else in history. NO. More people have been killed by governments than anything else in history ... ... .and just in the 20th century alone, and none of them were religious. You don't learn THAT in college. ~ Dennis Prager

Impossible is the mind that doesn't believe. ~ Hilary R.Chikandwa

Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do (a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder), in a rough outside coat, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner.... [W]e soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence. Melville has not been well, of late; ... and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success, latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind.... Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists -- and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before -- in wondering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.

[after what would be their last meeting] ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

I could feel Monika nudging me furiously at this point, but I refused to look at her. I wasn't feeling particularly reverent about my mother's deadness, or about the vicar, but I do despise that ghastly, 'You've got to laugh, haven't you?' approach to religious occasions. As a young man, I often goaded my believing friends with crudely logical questions about God. But as the years have passed, I have found myself hankering more and more for a little cosy voodoo in my life. Increasingly, I regard my atheism as a regrettable limitation. It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather, a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mystery: a species, in fact, of neurosis. There is no chance of my being converted, of course - it is far too late for that. But I wish it wasn't. ~ Zoe Heller

My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd. ~ Christopher Hitchens

It is the spectators, the people who are outside, looking at the tragedy, from whose ranks the skeptics come; it is not those who are actually in the arena and who know suffering from the inside. Indeed, the fact is that it is the world's greatest sufferers who have produced the most shining examples of unconquerable faith. ~ James Stewart

The Indians around here tell a cautionary fable about a great saint who was always surrounded in his Ashram by loyal devotees. For hours a day, the saint and his followers would meditate on God. The only problem was that the saint had a young cat, an annoying creature, who used to walk through the temple meowing and purring and bothering everyone during meditation. So the saint, in all his practical wisdom, commanded that the cat be tied to a pole outside for a few hours a day, only during meditation, so as to not disturb anyone. This became a habit – tying the cat to the pole and then meditating on God – but as years passed, the habit hardened into religious ritual. Nobody could meditate unless the cat was tied to the pole first. Then one day the cat died. The saint's followers were panic-stricken. It was a major religious crisis – how could they meditate now, without a cat to tie to a pole? How would they reach God? In their minds, the cat had become the means. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

When Christian theology becomes traditionalism and men fail to hold and use it as they do a living language, it becomes an obstacle, not a help to religious conviction. To the greatest of the early Fathers and the great scholastics theology was a language which, like all language, had a grammar and a vocabulary from the past, but which they used to express all the knowledge and experience of their own time as well. ~ Lily Dougall

True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete. ~ Malcolm X

--Your headache--


I am trying to imagine it
Your head is in your hands
The nurse is pouring pills onto a plate
November again
Too late

Your headache
It is a bird
Wounded, in leaves

Its sweet bird's nest is full of pain in a distant place

November
There are daisies
In the ruined garden, still blooming strangely

And in a manic yellow hat, the old lady

And the old man, dead in his bed

And their daughter, the saint:

Her dark, religious hair gets tangled in the branches
She is screaming, grabbing

While the nurses play Mozart in another room
While the bats fly over the roof
Snatch the black notes from the blackness
Laughing

You cry
I am going to die

I can see them through this window

Their little black capes

The touching ugliness of their little faces ~ Laura Kasischke

The good news is that Christ frees us from the need to obnoxiously focus on our goodness, our commitment, and our correctness. Religious has made us obsessive almost beyond endurance. Jesus invited us to a dance ... and we've turned in into a march of soldiers, always checking to see if we're doing it right and are in step and in line with the other soldiers. We know a dance would be more fun, but we believe we must go through hell to get to heaven, so we keep marching. ~ Steve Brown

One should be religious in everything, have God, whatever God might be, present in everything. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The day of the Nativity of the Mother of God is a day of universal joy, because through the Mother of God, the entire human race was renewed, and the sorrow of the first mother, Eve, was transformed into joy. ~ John Of Damascus

God will cleanse your sins if you yourself are dissatisfied with yourself and will keep on changing until you are perfect. ~ Saint Augustine

It is of interest to note that most secular humanists continue to belabor the horrors of the Inquisition in order to establish the moral depravity of Christianity. ~ Guenter Lewy

If we analyze religious or political doctrines with regard to their psychological significance we must differentiate between two problems. We can study the character structure of the individual who creates a new doctrine and try to understand which traits in his personality are responsible for the particular direction of his thinking.
[ ... ] The other problem is to study the psychological motives, not of the creator of a doctrine, but of the social group to which his doctrine appeals. The influence of any doctrine or idea depends on the extent to which it appeals to psychic needs in the character structure of those to whom it is addressed. Only if the idea answers powerful psychological needs of certain social groups will it become a potent force in history. ~ Erich Fromm

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

We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. ~ Abraham Lincoln

My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse - and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of - a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am not in the slightest bit motivated to go to my death rather than recant the formulas of physics. Watch: E doesn't equal mc2, it doesn't, it doesn't! I was lying, so there! ~ Daniel Dennett

Only he is a truly ethical, a truly human being, who has the courage to see through his own religious feelings and needs. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach

It's hard to explain," she says. "I would say that I'm more spiritual than religious at this point." "What does that even mean?" I stare upward at the gleaming stars. "To me, religion is the Walmart of spirituality. ~ Bill Konigsberg

Just think, you're here not by chance, but by God's choosing. His hand formed you and made you the person you are. He compares you to no one else - You are one of a kind. You lack nothing that His grace can't give you. He has allowed you to be here in this time in history to fulfill His special purpose for this generation ... ~ Roy Lessin

This book aims, in part, to help reverse the lamentable public retreat of religious liberals in recent decades. Yet, religious liberalism on the whole in the United States is by no means diminishing. Recent studies indicate that approximately one in four Americans describe themselves as religious liberals, roughly the same number as those who describe themselves as religious conservatives - and some suggest that the number of religious liberals may be even higher. To make sense of the numbers, we need to define religious liberal. While there are many ~ Paul B. Rasor

These friendly eyes, these lustful eyes, these hopeless, sad, dispirited eyes, these energetic amber eyes needing no escape, these serpent's eyes, cat's eyes, sorcerer's eyes, the eyes of future family men, funeral directors, and unsuspecting officers of the law, the mischievous eyes of plotters and planners, soon-to-be soldiers, or underworld attorneys on retainer, the eyes of maniacs and fanatics, hipsters and wallflowers, dreamers and the object of dreams, I gazed into them all and knew that they were human eyes, each pair offering insight toward a new tomorrow. ~ Ace Boggess

The soul is forever being. It is being what it is being, regardless of what the body is doing, not because of what it's doing. If you think your life is about doingness, you do not understand what you are about. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

He woos, he confronts, he delivers, he heals, he shoots straight, and then he uses intrigue. He lives out before them the most compelling view of God, shows them an incredibly attractive holiness while shattering the religious glaze. But still, he lets them walk away if they choose. ~ John Eldredge

Generosity is a willingness to give, to open without philosophical or pious or religious motives, just simply doing what is required at any moment in any situation, not being afraid to receive anything. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

Whoever will not love his enemies cannot know the Lord and the sweetness of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit teaches us to love our enemies in such way that we pity their souls as if they were our own children. ~ Silouan The Athonite

He who prohibited the making of a graven image would never himself have made an image in the likeness of holy things [i.e., by creating an image of them here on earth]. Nor is there at all any composite thing or creature endowed with sensation [made by God here on earth] like those in heaven. But the face is a symbol of the rational soul, the wings are the lofty ministers and energies of powers right and left, and the voice is delightful glory in endless contemplation. ~ Clement Of Alexandria

The ages of individual Supreme Court Justices were of significant concern to Zack, as were the nominations President John would make if these elderly Supreme Court Justices retired or passed away. Zack smiled to himself and wished the justices good health and long life. ~ Mark M. Bello

I'm still waiting for the Lord to come hug me. ~ Ja Rule

She'd been real melancholy in the fall - religious melancholy - it ran in her family. Her father worried so much over believing that he had committed the unpardonable sin that he died in the asylum. ~ L.M. Montgomery

FRACTURED FACTIONS
Many cults are created by the uncontrollable egos of religious zealots ~ Kamil Ali

Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. ~ Christopher Hitchens

All religious wars are about people arguing over who has the biggest invisible friend. ~ Yasser Arafat

We must remember we are stewards of what God has provided for us, not owners. ~ Joyce Meyer

Americans are finally coming to a point where they're accepting of religious criticism, is because George Bush is the first president who really put religion so front-and-center. He's the most Christ-y president we've ever had - and he is, not uncoincidentally, the biggest disaster we've ever had. I think even people who are religious don't like it shoved down their throat. I think people kind of get it on a certain level, that this is an antiscience administration, and we're living in a time where we can't afford to be antiscience - for environmental reasons, for educational reasons. ~ Bill Maher

If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Everyone takes part in the mosque for one reason; to have a prayer answered. ~ Shujoy Chowdhury

No book on this planet can give you the description of terms like religion, spirituality, divinity unless you discover it within the realm of your own mind. ~ Abhijit Naskar

A man can lead a reasonably full life without a family, a fixed local residence, or a religious affiliation, but if he is stateless he is nothing. He has no rights, no security, and little opportunity for a useful career. There is no salvation on earth outside the framework of an organized state. ~ Joseph Reese Strayer

Of the many influences that have shaped the United States into a distinctive nation and people, none may be said to be more fundamental and enduring than the Bible. ~ Ronald Reagan

I've wasted the last five years of my life dealing in religious articles. People today find spiritual solace in ballroom dancing. ~ Ben Katchor