Quotes about fanaticism

Many of the environmentalists who moved into the environmental movement after Silent Spring ... detested pollution and craved purity. Absolute purity. They wanted to enforce zero tolerance on all environmental pollutants, not just on carcinogens. With friends like these the environment needs no enemies.

The Koran! well, come put me to the test—

Lovely old book in hideous error drest—

Believe me, I can quote the Koran too,

The unbeliever knows his Koran best. And do you think that unto such as you,

A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew,

God gave the secret, and denied it me?—

Well, well, what matters it! believe that too.

The party and the CSA could get by without a lot of fellows who brought only fanaticism. Losing somebody with brains would have hurt much more. Brains were harder to come by.

“So this is the famous George Cannon of whom you telegraphed me, is it? He doesn’t look so much like a wild-eyed fanatic as some of the ones we snared before.”

“No, sir,” Custer agreed: close enough for his superiors to hear him, he made a point of agreeing with them. “But without their coldhearted, coolheaded comrades egging them on, the wild-eyed fanatics could not do so much damage.”

To the zealot overcome by his piety and to the journeyman of ideas concerned only with his marketable mental skills, the beginning and end of ideas lies in their efficacy with respect to some goal external to intellectual processes.

The intellectual … may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea. The effect is as observable in politics as in theology: the intellectual function can be overwhelmed by an excess of piety expended within too contracted a frame of reference.

“That is the god of jihad,” she said. “That is the god of crusades. They are identical except for their names.”

The sooner we can separate salvageable skeptics from self-righteous absolutists, the sooner we can move along.

“No matter who I ask, they answer out of the Dicta! Even when it doesn’t fit.”

“Doing such is not a new thing. In the former world, there were people who said all truth was contained in this or that holy book, this or that holy image, these or those holy beliefs. No matter how complicated their world became, no matter how much it changed, the only answers permitted were those that grew ever more tortuous and convoluted.”

“Until?”

“Until, some say, God turned his back on them for their failure to use the minds they had been given.”

My grandfather said people who can learn, learn morality the way they learn everything else, by building on history. He also said that some people cannot learn from history, so they cannot change. For them, there’s only one book or tradition or whatever it’s called in their religion, and in that book God is eternal and whatever the book says God commanded two or three or four thousand years ago, God still commands today. That may be kill homosexuals or kill nonbelievers. It may say enslave your enemies. It may say mutilate or sequester women, or sell your ten-year-old daughter for somebody’s third wife.

I’ve met the prophet Awateh, and he’s very religious, but he’s also completely off his head. It seems to me religious toleration stops when they intend to kill you or hurt you with it. Africa, that’s my aunt, she always said noninterference was a two-way street.