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Fanaticism Quotes

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Fanaticism Quotes

“It is more difficult to undermine faith than knowledge, love succumbs to change less than to respect, hatred is more durable than aversion, and at all times the driving force of the most important changes in this world has been found less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses, but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drove them forward.”

“Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, “simpler” time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same God, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country. But these days when more than half the people in the country can’t read at all, history is just one more vast unknown to them.”

“The Naskar DSM (NDSM Sonnet 2596) If your history book, pol-sci book, criminology book, doesn't register the US government as the planet's number one terrorist organization, followed by the british empire, you are studying fake history, fake sociology, fake criminology. If your psychology book doesn't declare upfront, that ultraindividualism is a sickness, you are studying fancy make believe; if your DSM doesn't mention that, fundamentalism and nationalism are the vilest plague of the mind, it's the DSM of a lesser species. Yet you know what the irony is - egotism, dollarism, fascism, fanaticism, fundamentalism, these are all normal, all natural, but they are normal in the jungle. The question is not, is it natural! The question is, should it be human nature!”

“Beyond tongue and tradition, Beyond ignorance and intolerance, Beyond fear and fanaticism, Beyond rigidity and recklessness, Beyond the desert of dead habit, Beyond the logical heartlessness, Beyond the lies of selfish order, Beyond the highs of whims and wishes, There's a valley of love and laughter. Come someday, I shall meet you there.”

“End of Fear (Sonnet 1172) Where the end of fear ends all barrier, Where biases no longer run amok, Where end of assumption sets forth ascension, Where heritage no more wreaks havoc, Where the head is without bent, and the heart is never skint, Where the spine is without dent, and the eyes are without squint, Where Christian, Muslim, Sikh 'n Jew, sit and share a cup of stew, Where Buddhist, Atheist, Jain, Hindu, live and laugh as one life crew, There beyond, where sentience lets no storm to brew, Out of the fossil, into the fervor, I shall meet you.”

“My belief is that, the mystics will never be happy nor sad because I took their side. Indeed, this is the right path that does not allow any type of fanaticism to penetrate the mind. In my noble opinion, these are the wisest human beings ever to exist.”

“The Anti-Fanaticism Sonnet Acceptance begets harmony, Reason begets solution. Solidarity conquers agony, Character conquers differentiation. Humility brings sanity, Forgiveness brings serenity. Patience breeds tenacity, Conscience breeds sanctity. Observation causes insight, Questions cause evolution. Self-correction facilitates might, Self-reliance facilitates ascension. So wake up and trample all fanaticism, Only then we'll be free from sectarianism.”

“Fanaticism is the opposite of love. A wise man once told me - he's a Muslim, by the way - that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic of his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic of his own religion.”

“Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.”

“Neighbor Before Nation (Sonnet 2201) Death of soldiers is PR goldmine for nationalist nutters, no matter the side, because it gives them the appetizing ammunition to sell some more fear, some more prejudice, some more fanatic tribalism, neighbor fighting neighbor, all wrapped in cute pills of patriotism - which ultimately manufactures some more orphans, some more widows, some more elderly who lose their hope. Trenches don't have a right side and wrong side, they only have one side, the side of dogma and lies. Asses to asses, cheek to cheek, apes laud the apes, declaring true apehood through their half-open flies.”

“She could have rambled with all the fervor of a woman who had loved one entity for longer than most races live, and with the inviolable, unquestioned certainty found in dementia. There were references dated and sealed with meticulous care which she would have enthusiastically opened with the mirth of one proclaiming a lifetime of honors and awards. But that singular event was freshly disturbed; its pores still drifted on the faint zephyr of remembrance.”

“The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list -- yes, even the short skirts and the dancing -- are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.”

“In the presence of Esch, values have hidden their faces. Order, loyalty, sacrifice—he cherishes all these words, but exactly what do they represent? Sacrifice for what? Demand what sort of order? He doesn't know. If a value has lost its concrete content, what is left of it? A mere empty form; an imperative that goes unheeded and, all the more furious, demands to be heard and obeyed. The less Esch knows what he wants, the more furiously he wants it. Esch: the fanaticism of the era with no God. Because all values have hidden their faces, anything can be considered a value. Justice, order—Esch seeks them now in the trade union struggle, then in religion; today in police power, tomorrow in the mirage of America, where he dreams of emigrating. He could be a terrorist or a repentant terrorist turning in his comrades, or a party militant or a cult member a kamikaze prepared to sacrifice his life. All the passions rampaging through the bloody history of our time are taken up, unmasked, and terrifyingly displayed in Esch's modest adventure.”

“The one great advantage of Bhakti is that it is the easiest and most natural way to reach the great divine end in view; it's great disadvantage is that in its lower forms it oftentimes degenerates into hideous fanaticism. The fanatical crew in Hinduism, Mohammedanism, or Christianity, have always been almost exclusively recruited from these worshippers [sic] on the lower planes of Bhakti. That singleness of attachment (Nishthâ) to a loved object, without which no genuine love can grow, is very often also the cause of the denunciation of everything else. All the weak and undeveloped minds in every religion or country have only one way of loving their own ideal, i.e., by hating every other ideal. Herein is the explanation of why the same man who is so lovingly attached to his own ideal of God, so devoted to his own ideal of religion, becomes a howling fanatic as soon as he sees or hears anything of any other ideal.”

“Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution—unresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science. When great truths are driven to make an appeal to reason, knowledge becomes criminal, and philosophers martyrs. Truth, however, like all moral powers, can neither be checked nor extinguished. When compressed, it but reacts the more. It crushes where it cannot expand—it burns where it is not allowed to shine. Human when originally divulged, it becomes divine when finally established. At first, the breath of a rage—at last it is the edict of a god. Endowed with such vital energy, astronomical truth has cut its way through the thick darkness of superstitious times, and, cheered by its conquests, Geology will find the same open path when it has triumphed over the less formidable obstacles of a civilized age.”

“[Adam] Michnik's openness to dialogue was neither a concession of defeat nor an expression of political opportunism on his part. It had its roots in a few fundamental beliefs that he never surrendered during his long public career and which have defined his political moderation to this day. The first one, connected to his modesty and humility, admits that we must always resist the temptation to believe in the righteousness of our views and ought to hold in check any form of moral egotism and arrogance that might creep in our views, however legitimate they might (appear to) be at some point. 'The angel who demands heroism not only of himself but of others,' Michnik cautioned, 'who perceives the world with a Manichaean simplicity and despises those who have a different concept of obligations toward others - this angel, loving heaven as he may, has already started on the path that leads to hell.' He was repeating an old favorite trope of Pascal, who warned us that those who pretend to behave like angels risk becoming fanatic beasts in the end.”

“Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?”

“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.”

“Fanaticism can often be a normalized phenomenon, and the unwritten recipe suggests that it starts and ends with absolute certainty. If you are always certain about everything, you might just live in an echo chamber, or there might be a lack of ideological diversity among your sources and friends. Only, there is no size limit to this echo chamber as long as there is consensus: and the bigger the chamber the more solidified the fanaticism, and the more solidified the fanaticism the more the outlier will be seen the liar and the fanatic.”

“I wonder, sometimes, if the Continentals were like shoals of fish, & the slightest flick of one fish caused dozens of others to follow suit, until the entire shimmering cloud had changed course. And were the Divinities the sum of this cloud? An embodiment, perhaps, of a national subconscious? Or were they empowered by the thoughts & praises of millions of people, yet also yoked to every one of those thoughts – giant, terrible puppets forced to dance by the strings of millions of puppeteers. This knowledge, I think, is incredibly dangerous. The Continentals derive so much pride & so much power from having Divine approval … but were they merely hearing the echoes of their own voices, magnified through strange caverns & tunnels? When they spoke to the Divinities, were they speaking to giant reflections of themselves?”

“On The Good Side of Government (Sonnet 2199) How to be on the good side of government, this is a manual for the monkeys - never question, never reason, never doubt, be a good little patriot, blind to atrocity. Foster no conviction on human rights, memorize the moral parameters set by the state, and remember, it's not about morality or ethics, it's about licking the boots of office idiots. Use music and movies as propaganda machine, for the government's favorite god 'n religion, never make art about correcting social ill, but about maintaining fanatical superstition. However, well aware of all the dangers, if you still dare to stand as human - I salute you, o brave beacon of life, there is hope yet for human civilization!”

“The Uncultured Linguist (Sonnet) The way apes understand what's cultured, I'm not that sort of cultured - I'm humanly cultured - which means, I live as cure for tribalism, not coddle; I abolish chains, not worship them, I do not entertain stereotypes - I question and denounce prejudice, both external and internal. MAGA, Zionism, Hindutva, Prima gli Italiani, Khalistan, Islamism, Türkiye Yüzyılı, these are proof, we come from the monkeys; while humans take a snooze, monkeys roam free. Dogma is barrier to understanding, blind faith is obstacle to holiness. Assumption is obstacle to communication, stereotypes are obstacle to awareness.”

“Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.”

“Naskar, The Origin Story (Sonnet 1999) Naren, Subhas, Abhijit, three vessels, one spirit. All three spring from paramhansa, in paramhansa we three perish. One mission, three vessels - one teacher, three students. Erase the one teacher, and you erase our driving promise. Before the scientist emerged poet, he was but a wandering monk - born nirvikalpa from sahasrara Gadadhar - Naren, Subhas, Abhijit, are not three but one. Awake, arise, adopt the world! Give me brains, and give me heart. Whenever fear and fanaticism take hold, from amongst you will rise a Naskar.”