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Fanatics Quotes

Quotes tagged as "fanatics" Showing 1-30 of 43
Bertrand Russell
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
Bertrand Russell

Robert F. Kennedy
“What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.”
Robert F. Kennedy

Christopher Hitchens
“Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.”
Christopher Hitchens

Leah Wilson
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves and wiser people so full of doubt.”
Leah Wilson, The Girl Who Was on Fire: Your Favorite Authors on Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy

C.G. Jung
“Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt”
Carl Gustav Jung

Friedrich Nietzsche
“Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

Mouloud Benzadi
“Fundamentalism manifests itself in different shapes and colors. 'The Absolute Truth' and 'the Only Way' beliefs, which have always caused hatred, bloodshed and divided our world, are among them.”
Mouloud Benzadi

Toba Beta
“Fanatics don't wanna see anything from another standpoints.”
Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

G.K. Chesterton
“Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left — sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

Amos Oz
“A prominent israeli writer, Sami Michael, once told of a long car journey with a driver. At some point, the driver explained to Michael how important, indeed how urgent, it is for us Jews “to kill all the Arabs.” Sami Michael listened politely, and instead of reacting with horror, denunciation, or disgust, he asked the driver an innocent question: “And who, in your opinion, should kill all the Arabs?”

“Us! The Jews! We have to! It’s either us or them! Can’t you see what they’re doing to us?”

“But who, exactly, should actually kill all the Arabs? The army? The police? Firemen, perhaps? Or doctors in white coats, with syringes?”

The driver scratched his head, pondered the question, and finally said, “We’ll have to divvy it up among us. Every Jewish man will have to kill a few Arabs.”

Michael did not let up: “All right. Let’s say you, as a Haifa man, are in charge of one apartment building in Haifa. You go from door to door, ring the bells, and ask the residents politely, ‘Excuse me, would you happen to be Arabs?’ If the answer is yes, you shoot and kill them. When you’re done killing all the Arabs in the building, you go downstairs and head home, but before you get very far you hear a baby crying on the top floor. What do you do? Turn around? Go back? Go upstairs and shoot the baby? Yes or no?”

A long silence. The driver considers. Finally he says, “Sir, you are a very cruel man!”

This story exposes the confusion sometimes found in the fanatic’s mind: a mixture of intransigence with sentimentality and a lack of imagination.”
Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

Toba Beta
“Fanatics clouded by self-justification.”
Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

Stewart Stafford
“If someone threatens you for telling a joke, that's all the more reason to tell it. Humour is the perfect antidote to fanaticism.”
Stewart Stafford

Liu Cixin
“Now, faced with political cases like yours, all prosecutorial organs and courts would rather be too severe than too lax. This is because treating you too severely would just be a mistake in method, but treating you too laxly would be a mistake in political direction.”
Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

John D. MacDonald
“The same idea was said in a different way by Eric Hoffer, the old dock-walloper, in his book years ago titled The True Believer. Hoffer's theory was that the best fanatics are people who have nothing in their heads but wind, smoke, and emptiness. Then if any idea manages to slip in there, it does not matter how insipid or grotesque that idea might be, it will expand to fill all the available emptiness, and it takes over the individual and all his actions. He cannot hear any voice but his own. He is beyond reason, beyond argumentation. He is right and everyone who does not believe exactly the same as he is wrong.”
John D. MacDonald, Reading for Survival

Amos Oz
“Fanatics tend to live in a black-and-white world, with a simplistic view of good against evil. The fanatic is in fact a person who can only count to one. Yet at the same time, and without any contradiction, the fanatic almost always basks in some sort of bittersweet sentimentalism, composed of a mixture of fury and self-pity.”
Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

Amos Oz
“Self-sacrifice can sometimes be a well-honed weapon that the fanatic wields for destructive emotional purposes. Moreover, those who are eager to sacrifice themselves will not find it difficult to sacrifice others.”
Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

Amos Oz
“In addition to curiosity and imagination, another effective antidote to fanaticism might be humor, and especially the ability to make fun of ourselves. I, for one, have never met a fanatic with a sense of humor. Nor have I ever known anyone capable of making a joke at his own expense become a fanatic. Humor engenders a curvature that allows one to see, at least momentarily, old things in a new light. Or to see yourself, at least for a moment, as others see you. This curvature invites us to let hot air out of any excessive importance, including self-importance. Moreover, humor usually entails a measure of relativity, of abasing the sublime.”
Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

Amos Oz
“The fanatic loathes an open-ended situation. Perhaps he does not acknowledge such situation. He always has an urgent need to know what the 'bottom line' is, what the inevitable conclusion is, when we will finally 'come full circle.' Yet history, including the private history of each of us, is usually not a circle but a line: a winding line with retreats and bends, which sometimes changes course and intersects with itself and occasionally draws loops, but nevertheless, a line and not a circle. Being immune to fanaticism entails, among other things, a willingness to exist inside open-ended situations that do not come full circle and cannot be unequivocally settled. A readiness to live with questions and choices whose resolutions hide far beyond the hazy horizon.”
Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

Amos Oz
“Kad su moji prijatelji otkrili da se družimo, počeli su me nazivati izdajnikom. Nakon mnogo dana polako sam pronašao utjehu u misli da je izdajnik u očima fanatika onaj koji se usuđuje promijeniti. Svaka vrsta fanatizma, u svako vrijeme i na svakome mjestu, izražava gnušanje prema promjeni, strahuje od nje te sumnjičavo vidi promjenu zapravo kao izdaju koja izvire iz mračnih i podlih pobuda.”
Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

Stewart Stafford
“Faith can be as terrifying as it is reassuring.”
Stewart Stafford

Amos Oz
“There are varying degrees of evil in the world. The distinction between levels of evil is perhaps the primary moral responsibility incumbent upon each of us. Every child knows that cruelty is bad and contemptible, while its opposite, compassion, is commendable. That is an easy and simple moral distinction. The more essential and far more difficult distinction is the one between different shades of gray, between degrees of evil. Aggressive environmental activists, for example, or the furious opponents of globalization, may sometimes emerge as violent fanatics. But the evil they cause is immeasurably smaller than that caused by a fanatic who commits a large-scale terrorist attack. Nor are the crimes of the terrorist fanatic comparable to those of fanatics who commit ethnic cleansing or genocide.

Those who are unwilling or unable to rank evil may thereby become the servants of evil. Those who make no distinction between such disparate phenomena as apartheid, colonialism, ISIS, Zionism, political incorrectness, the gas chambers, sexism, the 1 percent's wealth, and air pollution serve evil with their very refusal to grade it.”
Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

Amos Oz
“One of the distinct hallmarks of the fanatic is his fervent desire to change you so that you will be like him. To convince you that you must immediately convert, abandon your world, and move into his. The fanatic does not want there to be any differences between people. He wants us all to be as one. He desires a world with no curtains drawn, no blinds shuttered, no doors locked, no shadow of a private life, for we must all be one body and one soul. We must all march together in threes on the path ascending to redemption, whether this redemption or the opposite one.

The fanatic strives to upgrade and improve you, to open your eyes so that you, too, can see the light. Indeed, in that sense the fanatic is a wondrously altruistic and extremely unselfish creature: he is interested in you far more than he is in himself. Day and night he yearns to save your soul, to unshackle you, to take you out of darkness into the light, to redeem you once and for all from error and sin. Here he comes to hug you, sick with worry about your condition, bubbling with goodwill to change your prayer habits (or lack thereof), your voting or smoking habits, your eating habits, your preferences, your entire lifestyle, which is so harmful to you. All the fanatic wants is to take you in his arms and hug you, to raise you from the lowly spot you are stuck in and place you in the sublime place he has discovered, where he has since been basking and to which you must ascend immediately. For your very own good.”
Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

Amos Oz
“The fanatic is always in a hurry to fall on your neck to save you, because he loves you. He loves you unconditionally. But, conversely, he might grab you and strangle you if he discovers that you are beyond redemption. Lost. And if that is the case, he is obliged to hate you and rid the world of you.”
Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

Amos Oz
“Like all types of zealotry, violent Islam is not limited to a gang of sadistic, bloodthirsty fanatics. At its foundation stands an idea. A bitter, desperate idea, a distorted idea. However, it is worth remembering that one can almost never vanquish an idea, twisted as it may be, simply by using a big stick. There must be a response; there must be an opposing idea, a more attractive belief, a more persuasive promise. I am unopposed to using a big stick against murderers. I do not believe in turning the other cheek, nor do I share the prevalent opinion whereby violence is the absolute evil. To me, the most extreme evil is not violence but aggression. Violence is the manifestation of aggression. It is often essential to curb aggression with a big stick, as long as the stick is accompanied by an appealing, convincing idea. Absent such an idea, fanatics of one kind or another will step in to fill the void.”
Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

Amos Oz
“Fanaticism ... is contagious: a person may catch it even as he fights to cure other people of it. There is no shortage of anti-fanaticism fanatics in the world. All sorts of crusades to stop jihad, and jihads to subjugate the new crusaders. This includes the zeal so prevalent in Israel and in the West these days to deliver a knockout blow that will finish off all the bloodthirsty fanatics and anyone like them once and for all. To eradicate every last bastion of zealotry.”
Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

Amos Oz
“Contending with fanaticism does not mean destroying all fanatics, but rather cautiously handling the little fanatic who hides, more or less, inside each of our souls. It also means ridiculing, just a little, our own convictions; being curious; and trying to take a peek, from time to time, not only through our neighbor's window but, more important, at the reality viewed from that window, which will necessarily be different from the one seen through our own.”
Amos Oz, שלום לקנאים

Octavia E. Butler
“What does Jarett really think about the Crusaders? Does he control them? If he doesn't like what they're doing, he should make some effort to stop them. He shouldn't want them to make their insanity part of his political image.

On the other hand, one way to make people afraid of you is to have a crazy side--a side of yourself or your organization that's dangerous and unpredictable--willing to do any damned thing.”
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

Abhijit Naskar
“If you could reason with fanaticism, there wouldn't be any fanaticism in the world.”
Abhijit Naskar, Sin Dios Sí Hay Divinidad: The Pastor Who Never Was

Thomas M. Disch
“Paranoia, soaring paranoia. It's the people who are loyalest to the Village [the State] who are most susceptible. They begin to think everyone is betraying the cause but themselves.”
Thomas M. Disch, The Prisoner

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