Fanaticism Quotes

Fanatics can justify practically any atrocity to themselves. The more untenable their position becomes, the harder they hold to it, and the worse the things they are willing to do to support it.

Mercedes Lackey

In the fevered state of our country, no good can ever result from any attempt to set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in fact or principle. They are determined as to the facts they will believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, therefore, as you would by an angry bull; it is not for a man of sense to dispute the road with such an animal.

Thomas Jefferson

Many causes produce war. There are ancient hatreds, turbulent frontiers, the legacy of old forgotten, far-off things, and battles long ago. There are new-born fanaticisms. Convictions on the part of certain peoples that they have become the unique depositories of ultimate truth and right.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The worst vice of a fanatic is his sincerity.

Oscar Wilde

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.

Edward Gibbon

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, then and only then will truth, prevail over fanaticism

Thomas Jefferson

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

Alexander Pope

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 your life?

Christopher Hitchens

Railing and praising were his usual themes; and both showed his judgment in extremes. Either over violent or over civil, so everyone to him was either god or devil.

John Dryden

So over violent, or over civil that every man with him was God or Devil.

John Dryden

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

George Orwell

A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case.

Finley Peter Dunne

In the history of mankind, fanaticism has caused more harm than vice.

Louis Kronenberger

The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the nature of men having escaped one extreme, which by force they were constrained long to endure, to run headlong into the other extreme, forgetting that virtue doth always consist in the mean.

Sir Walter Raleigh

Mere human beings can't afford to be fanatical about anything. Not even about justice or loyalty. The fanatic for justice ends by murdering a million helpless people to clear a space for his law-courts. If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.

Storm Jameson

fanaticism is the only way to put an end to the doubts that constantly trouble the human soul.

Paulo Coelho

What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he's certain he'll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?

Voltaire