Zealot Quotes

The work of God which is conversion is truly saving in the most personal sense. There is not – as some folk vainly preach – an element of self-denial or restriction in conversion. The converted man does not denounce or give up what he was before as a person, but what he was before as a person is, in conversion, restored to him in maturity and fulfillment. It was so with Paul – who was a great zealot. Before his conversion, Paul was the most zealous persecutor of Christ. After his conversion, Paul becomes the most zealous evangelist and apologist. Both before and after, Paul is still Paul the zealot. Paul is still the person he is in every sense, save that now that which he is, is freed from tribute to death and fulfilled – made new – brought to mature humanity – in Christ. ~ William Stringfellow

The golden age is before us, not behind us. ~ Simon The Zealot

The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end - wealth, fame, eternal salvation - but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. This is no less true for the religious fanatic than for the fanatical pianist or fanatical mountain climber. As a result of his (or ~ Jon Krakauer

To disarm a zealot, teach him truth by precept, and mildness by example. ~ Al-Kindi

I was a reluctant convert, and I am by no means a zealot. But the evidence is compelling: to write off wind-power is either ill-informed or dishonest. ~ Jonathan Dimbleby

Also, the world contains a lot of people. The statistics of power-law distributions and the events of the past two centuries agree in telling us that a small number of perpetrators can cause a great deal of damage. If somewhere among the world's six billion people there is a zealot who gets his hands on a stray nuclear bomb, he could single-handedly send the statistics through the roof. But even if he did, we would still need an explanation of why homicide rates fell a hundredfold, why slave markets and debtors' prisons have vanished, and why the Soviets and Americans did not go to war over Cuba, to say nothing of Canada and Spain over flatfish. ~ Steven Pinker

Priests are always easy to blame. They make convenient scapegoats - after all, anyone with a strong faith different from your own must either be a crazy zealot or a lying manipulator. ~ Brandon Sanderson

I view music as entertainment. When I'm on stage, I don't look at that as a platform for sharing ideology. Otherwise I'd be a zealot myself. That's why, when people ask me, 'Do you think you can change the world through your music?' I say, 'I doubt it.' ~ Greg Graffin

Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurious as to leave unexamined the influence and motives of a woman who once boasted of operating more than five hundred convents in upward of 105 countries - "without counting India"? Lone self-sacrificing zealot, or chair of a missionary multinational? The scale alters with the perspective, and the perspective alters with the scale. ~ Christopher Hitchens

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

A single zealot may commence prosecutor, and better men be his victims. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools. ~ David Addington

That man is thought a dangerous knave, Or zealot plotting crime, Who for advancement of his kind Is wiser than his time. ~ Douglas William Jerrold

I would rather have strong enemies than a world of passive individualists. In a world of passive individualists nothing seems worth anything simply because nobody stands for anything. That world has no convictions, no victories, no unions, no heroism, no absolutes, no heartbeat. That world has rigor mortis. ~ Criss Jami

Spheres are indeed fertile theoretical tools that help us gain insight into all manner of astrophysical problems. But one should not be a sphere-zealot. I am reminded of the half-serious joke about how to increase milk production on a farm: An expert in animal husbandry might say, "Consider the role of the cow's diet..." An engineer might say, "Consider the design of the milking machines..." But it's the astrophysicist who says, "Consider a spherical cow... ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows he is right. For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle. ~ Christopher Hitchens

A poet's marriage to his time is a forced marriage. A marriage of which - as of any suffered violence - he is ashamed, and from which he tries to tear loose. Poets of the past tear into the past, those of the present into the future, as if time were less time for not being my own! All Soviet poetry is a stake on the future. Solely Mayakovsky, this zealot of his own conscience, this convict of the present day, came to love this present day; overcame, that is, the poet in himself. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

Maybe that's where it started and they brought it back from the desert, some kind of contagious psychic wound, guilt based. Maybe it's the dark matter, invisibly making up most of the universe. Maybe it was methane thawing at the bottom of the sea, releasing some ancient spore from the melted icebergs. Maybe it was the hole in the ozone, the collapse of the upper atmosphere. Maybe it was the overload of information, the swarms of data generated by every human gesture. Maybe it was the networking craze, the resurrection of dead friendships and memories meant to be lost, now resurfacing like rusted shipwrecks to reclaim our attention and scramble our sense of time. Maybe it was the death of an artist at the hands of a zealot. Maybe it was the particles made to collide. Maybe the mapping of the genome. Maybe the clashing of gods, the tug-of-war over our souls, not one of them refusing to let go, instead opting to see us sliced in two by Soloman's sword. Maybe it was food becoming a prop for food. Maybe it was a distant comet dusting us with its tail of poisoned ice. Maybe it was someone uttering a combination of syllables that should never be uttered. Maybe it was the emergence of collective intelligence, the flattening of the world. Maybe the game we inhabit had a glitch. Maybe the angel's horn had finally been blown. ~ Kenneth Calhoun

Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy - not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits - despotic in his ordinary demeanour - known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty - when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity - to join in the cry of danger to liberty - to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion - to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day - It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may "ride the storm and direct the whirlwind. ~ Alexander Hamilton

To be honest, one can only feel glad that so many modern iconoclasts consider Christianity to be full of exceptionally hypocritical, religious zealots - it's biblically accurate and a prophecy fulfilled. The old smoke screen is one of Satan's favorite tricks. He conceals the authentic. He has a persistent strategy of targeting those who remind him of Christianity because he fears those who remind him of Christ. ~ Criss Jami

When I go to Iran, I see ... that there are all different shades and colors in Iran, from atheist to religious zealot. So Iran is no different than any other country. I mean, they are connected with the rest of the world. ~ Mohamed ElBaradei

His razor flashed once, briefly, and the zealot cried out in agony as he was instantly and expertly circumsized.
"You can go now," said Razor Eddie, and the zealot ran, howling all the way down the Street. And everyone who'd been watching went about their business again.
"Well," I said, trying to keep it light. "At least he's not a complete prick anymore. ~ Simon R. Green

There are different kinds of terrorist movements, and specifically you occasionally face a bully, a Qaddafi. But a bully is different from a zealot. A bully you can deal with, with force, and persuade that bully, through force alone, to stop what he was doing. ~ Robert McFarlane

If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped. ~ Paul Johnson

Well, who is more likely to volunteer to take a job in a bureaucracy that has little to recommend it except that it gives you the power to use government force to control the lives of others? A dispassionate scientist or a zealot? In government, the zealots eventually take over. ~ John Stossel

Here's our problem today. Not only do we not like ultimatums, but we have too many Christians who have accepted Jesus into their hearts and who have been baptized and who have confessed their sins and who have joined the Church and who are in Bible studies and who are absolutely 100 percent convinced they are going to heaven, but who are not followers of Jesus. There are many who haven't made it real. The mark of a follower of Jesus is following. The mark of a follower of Jesus is that she or he has given Jesus her or his heart. It's that simple. It's that demanding. It's that serious. Jesus was a moral zealot and he expected his followers to become moral zealots too. He wanted them to live the Committed. Life. ~ Scot McKnight

Being myself a warm zealot for the attainment & enjoiment by all mankind of as much liberty as each may exercise without injury to the equal liberty of his fellow citizens, I have lamented that in France the endeavors to obtain this should have been attended with the effusion of so much blood. ~ Thomas Jefferson

A child who had been introduced to misery in Saudi Arabia, a teenager who went to wage jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a deeply devout Muslim who had graduated with honors in medicine, a man who had fed a stranger to wild dogs in Damascus, a zealot who had dosed three foreigners with smallpox and watched them die in agony, gave thanks to Allah for the blessings that had been bestowed upon him. ~ Terry Hayes

If there's one thing worse than a zealot, it's a hypocrite!
Merlin, from the X-Calibur sequel ~ R. Jackson-Lawrence

If we read the text alone, assuming that the word 'cross' can only derive its meaning from the later death of Jesus, then its appearance in the text must be an anachronism read back into the story after the crucifixion. This conclusion becomes unnecessary if the cross, being the standard punishment for insurrection or for the refusal to confess Caesar's lordship, already had a clear definition in the listener's awareness. 'Take up your cross' may even have been a standard phrase of Zealot recruiting. The disciple's cross is not a metaphor for self-mortification or even generally innocent suffering; 'if you follow me, your fate will be like mine, the fate of a revolutionary. You cannot follow me without facing that fate. ~ John Howard Yoder

In any case, the Christian world is not one, neither is the Islamic, nor does their combined authority speak to or for the entire world, but the world of the fanatic IS one and it cuts across all religions, ideologies and vocations. The tributaries that feed the cesspool of fanaticism may ooze from sources separated by history, clime and race, by injustices and numerous privations, but they arrive at the same destination - the zone of unquestioning certitude - sped by a common impetus that licences each to proclaim itself the pure and unsullied among the polluted. The zealot is one that creates a Supreme Being, or Supreme Purpose, in his or her own image, then carries out the orders of that solipsistic device that commands from within, in lofty alienation from, and utter contempt of, society and community. ~ Wole Soyinka

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. ~ Jonathan Stroud

Having lost faith in all else, zealots have nothing left but a holy cause to please a warrior God. They win if we become holy warriors, too; if we kill the innocent as they do; strike first at those who had not struck us; allow our leaders to use the fear of terrorism to make us afraid of the truth; cease to think and reason together, allowing others to tell what's in God's mind. ~ Bill Moyers

Stay till the end. "
"And after, and always."
"I want to feel safe again. I want to go home to Ravka. "
"Then I'll take you there. We'll set fire to raisins or whatever you heathens do for fun. "
"Zealot."
"Witch."
"Barbarian. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Susan Orlean

I guess it's probably safer to be this way bout clothing than men or religion or something that could be really dangerous. I'm quite pragmatic about other choices in my life, but with clothing I'm a romantic - I abandon myself completely and the practical side get trumped. I become a zealot. ~ Emily Spivack

Trump's most fanatic supporters will never admit that he is anything less than the Second Coming of Christ, because it is much easier to brainwash someone into being a zealot than it is to make a zealot realize he has been brainwashed. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as "the soul." So I hit him. What would you do? ~ Warren Ellis

The choice between James's vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul's vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one for the second and third generations of Jesus's followers to make.
Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul's creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. ~ Reza Aslan

Most guys will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you're a real person, and some will just ignore you.
The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

There is a difference between criticizing people and criticizing a people's uninformed ideals. That is, unless one defines himself or others by their ideals, then he is offended, and usually offended secretly. Because oddly enough, this person is the same person quickest to resort to dismissive name-calling, such as 'bigot' or 'zealot'. And oddly enough, he is always the one, the 'open-minded' one, who adamantly protests for, not only himself, but others not to listen to any type of scholarly theological truth inherently for the sake of his own personal, moral beliefs. ~ Criss Jami

He said, "So ... do you like music?"
It was a pretty stupid question. I mean, who doesn't like music? Okay, maybe some puritanical zealot out in Hicksville.
But really. It was kind of like asking, "Do you like food?" "Isn't oxygen great?" "Have you got skin? I do." I knew what he meant, though. ~ Kristin Walker

I think while zealots fast and frown,
And fight for two or seven,
That there are fifty roads to town,
And rather more to Heaven. ~ Winthrop Mackworth Praed

The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion. ~ G. Willow Wilson

I wouldn't consider myself a Buddhist or a card-carrying zealot at all. My first commitment is as a scientist to uncover the truth about all this. ~ Richard Davidson

I was always a doubter when it came to religion. How irrational of me, then, to love a zealot. But then, both love and zealotry are irrational states of mind. ~ Octavia E. Butler

The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should hopefully reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth - Jesus the man - is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in. ~ Reza Aslan

After Death nothing is, and nothing, death,
The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.
Let the ambitious zealot lay aside
His hopes of heaven, whose faith is but his pride;
Let slavish souls lay by their fear
Nor be concerned which way nor where
After this life they shall be hurled.
Dead, we become the lumber of the world,
And to that mass of matter shall be swept
Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.
Devouring time swallows us whole.
Impartial death confounds body and soul.
For Hell and the foul fiend that rules
God's everlasting fiery jails
(Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),
With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,
Are senseless stories, idle tales,
Dreams, whimseys, and no more. ~ John Wilmot

I was probably toward 8 1/2 when I actually joined the church and was baptized - and, my God, did I take it seriously! I was a zealot who irritated every one of my third-grade friends. They didn't beat me up, but I got labeled "the preacher girl." ~ Oprah Winfrey

Be kind to her when she comes back. Her love is not only for children but for humanity. She will be a good-hearted and magnificent zealot one day. As her mother is now.
Goodbye, Kate. And below he had signed as he rarely did, with his Christian name. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

They [zealots] would have everybody be as blind as themselves: to them, to be clear-sighted is libertinism. ~ Moliere

Whether you are buying a car or casting a ballot, choosing a job or planning a family, follow your moral compass. Don't let others define you. Don't let advertisers mold you; don't let zealots ensnare you; don't let conventional wisdom trap you ... you are part of a much larger whole. ~ Denis Hayes

Cynicism has its own zealots. ~ Mason Cooley

Stay," she panted. Tears leaked from her eyes. "Stay till the end."
"And after," he said. "And always."
"I want to feel safe again. I want to go home to Ravka."
"Then I'll take you there. We'll set fire to raisins or whatever you heathens do for fun."
"Zealot," she said weakly.
"Witch."
"Barbarian."
"Nina," he whispered, "little red bird. Don't go. ~ Leigh Bardugo

There are always forces at work in a society, which are really forces of censorship - either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film. ~ John Boorman

The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement, but few can argue with it. ~ Carl Sagan

I have done no wrong but the zealots are trying to attack me because I am so critical of them. ~ Sunil Gangopadhyay