38 Quotes About Zealotry

Zealots, ideologues, and tyrants are usually the people who feel that free speech is dangerous because it challenges their power.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

Anyone who says he knows God's intention is showing a lot of very human ego.

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.

That's what you get,' he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, 'when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains.

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.