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שלום לקנאים

Book by Amos Oz · 4 quotes · Dear Zealots, Extremism, Fanatics

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שלום לקנאים Quotes

“This war is being fought between fanatics convinced that their ends sanctify all means, and everyone else - all those who hold that life is an end and not a means. It is a struggle between people who believe that justice, whatever that term may mean to them, is more important than life, and those who maintain that life takes precedence over other values.”

“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.”

“In my novel 'Panther in the Basement,' I retold the experiences that revealed to me, as a child, that sometimes there are two sides to a story, that conflicts are colored not only in black and white. In the last year of the British Mandate, when I was about eight, I befriended a British policeman who spoke ancient Hebrew and had memorized most of the Bible. He was a fat, asthmatic, emotional man, and perhaps a slightly muddled one, who fervently believed that the Jewish people's return to its ancestral land heralded redemption for the world at large. When the other children discovered my friendship with this man, they called me a traitor. Much later, I learned to take comfort in the thought that, for fanatic, a traitor is anyone who dares to change. Fanatics of all kinds, in all places at all times, loathe and fear change, suspecting that it is nothing less than a betrayal resulting from dark, base motives.”