Top 93 Quotes About Cults
#1. All religions are ultimately cargo cults. Adherents perform required rituals, follow specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally gifted with desired rewards long life, honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth, victory over opponents, immortality after death, any desired rewards.
Octavia Butler
#2. If a spiritual teacher says something that doesn't make sense to you, you should always listen to yourself and not the teacher. A little common sense would end all cults.
Frederick Lenz
#3. At first, laws evolved out of religious doctrines. It followed that they were recognized only when advantageous to those who practiced the same religion and who appeared equals under the protection of the same gods. For the members of all other cults, there was neither law nor mercy.
Leon Bourgeois
#4. When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.
Daniel Bell
#5. There is a great interest in comparative religion and a desire to understand faiths other than our own and even to experiment with exotic cults.
Emily Greene Balch
#6. The Rose has always been the premiere symbol of female sexuality. In primitive goddess cults, the five petals represented the five stations of female life - birth, menstruation, motherhood, menopause, and death. And in modern times, the flowering rose's ties to womanhood are considered more visual.
Dan Brown
#7. All religion is in daily need of reformation because all religion, in both blatant and subtle ways, seeks to make itself and its creeds, codes, and cults more important than the revelation and experience it is meant to serve and pass on.
Paul F. Knitter
#8. I've been involved in a number of cults both as a leader and a follower. You have more fun as a follower but you make more money as a leader.
Creed Bratton
#9. The fact that some religious fanatics might support a theory doesn't invalidate it, anymore than the concurrence of UFO abduction cults invalidates the notion of extra-terrestrial life.
James P. Hogan
#10. Talk openly about important issues like money, sex, and religion. They can affect your life and happiness a great deal. Especially when it comes to cults.
Jesse Petersen
#11. Priests of a thousand cults proclaim the essential goodliness of Man. They must be fools. All I see is people flinging themselves at the chance to do evil.
Glen Cook
#12. I don't think I'm mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.
Neil Gaiman
#13. I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules. On
Robin Sloan
#14. On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable.
Tim Berners-Lee
#15. The monotheist religions expelled the gods through the front door with a lot of fanfare, only to take them back in through the side window. Christianity, for example, developed its own pantheon of saints, whose cults differed little from those of the polytheistic gods.
Yuval Noah Harari
#16. Being well regulated in relatedness is the deeply gratifying state that people seek ceaselessly in romance, religions, and cults; in husbands and wives, pets, softball teams, bowling leagues, and a thousand other features of human life driven by the thirst for sustaining affiliations. (157)
Thomas Lewis
#17. Many ritually abusive cults deliberately divide the personality system down the middle of the head, making sure that there is no communication between the two sides. "Left side" parts might be instructed to speak to no one other than the perpetrators.
Alison Miller
#18. Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos.
Thomas A. Bailey
#19. The Christless cults and deity-dishonoring mushroom religions of this midnight hour tempt the Lord God. Will no one sound the alarm?
Leonard Ravenhill
#20. When people leave cults, they don't know that they left a cult.
Sean Durkin
#21. You see, 30 years ago I didn't have near the audience I have now. My tapes on the cults have reached a circulation of 15 million. those are not my figures but the figures of the people who distribute them.
Walter Martin
#22. Modern society has not rid itself of religion, as it fondly believes; it has merely replaced the historical religions by a host of idolatrous cults struggling for possession of the soul of man.
Will Herberg
#23. Manism (ancestor cults) - but it was not as concerned
Reza Aslan
#24. The Tea Baggers, they're not a movement, they're a cult ... Cults tend to populate from within, encouraging members to have huge broods of children and to give them strange names, like Moonbeam, and Trig.
Bill Maher
#25. I'm all for 'tools,' not 'schools,' of therapy. To me, the schools of therapy compete much like religions, or even cults, all claiming to know the cause and to have the best method for treating people.
David D. Burns
#26. I've always been interested in the way males seem to need to start clubs, or cults, to keep girls out until they need them for sex. It comes from some weird immature tribal crap, I'm sure.
Gilberto Hernandez Guerrero
#27. A society that is not founded on morality falls apart and becomes easy prey to puritan cults such as Islam that on the surface, promote family values and morality.
Ali Sina
#28. It's one of the fliers from the apocalypse cults that sprang up like pimples on greased skin after the attacks. It
Susan Ee
#29. Within the theological structure of the cults there is considerable truth, all of which, it might be added, is drawn from biblical sources, but so diluted with human error as to be more deadly than complete falsehood.
Walter Ralston Martin
#30. take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered.
Peter Thiel
#31. Even small cults are a serious cost on the world economy, to victims, their families, employers, friends, and credit-card companies.
Keith Henson
#32. The difference between religions and cults is determined by how much real estate is owned.
Frank Zappa
#33. The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.
Peter Thiel
#34. The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power.
Katherine Dunn
#36. After millions of years of evolution, we start stupid cults of celebrity and feed the egos of maniacs until they take our money, fuck us in the arse, and then cut our throats. We should be cutting their throats!
Adam Nevill
#37. Cults, or related social movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, result in massive military expenses.
Keith Henson
#38. When you become a sannyasin, I initiate you into freedom, and into nothing else ... I am destroying your ideologies, creeds, cults, dogmas, and I am not replacing them with anything else.
Rajneesh
#39. He said a ritual, right?" asked Becky. "Maybe he's part of one of those doomsday cults where you have to cut off your wang and wear a track suit. They always think the world is going to end for no good reason.
Dennis Liggio
#40. You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.
Robin Sloan
#41. A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.
Robert Smithson
#42. Many cults start off with high ideals that get corrupted by leaders or their board of advisors who become power-hungry and dominate and control members' lives. No group with high ideals starts off as a 'cult'; they become one when their errant ways are exposed.
Philip Zimbardo
#43. Every new movement or group of people who seek to explore awareness is considered a cult. The United States was founded by several cults. They felt that Protestantism had become much too lax, so they came to America and set up a hard line religious cult.
Frederick Lenz
#44. The food habits of the different classes of Hindus have been as fixed and stratified as their cults. Just as Hindus can be classified on their basis of their cults, so also they can be classified on the basis of their habits of food.
B.R. Ambedkar
#45. FRACTURED FACTIONS
Many cults are created by the uncontrollable egos of religious zealots
Kamil Ali
#46. What the masses don't realize is that they're looking for a shepherd. Those who don't think they can be influenced or call themselves 'independent thinkers' are usually the biggest conformists of all - and the easiest to turn. Why do you think cults prey on college students? Easy picking.
Richard Paul Evans
#47. The moon made horns, the sky was gnarly. The cults were skittish.
China Mieville
#48. ..and whatever you do stay away from cults. There are all sorts of nutty cults out in Lala Land. Crazy people believing in aliens and spaceships."
"Mama, you believe in aliens and spaceships."
"Yes, but I believe in Jesus, too. That makes it different.
Marshall Thornton
#49. Persecution always acts as a jell for members of cults; it proves to them, in the absence of history, liturgy, tradition, and doctrine, that they are God's chosen.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
#50. California is a state peculiarly addicted to swift enthusiasms. It is a seed-bed of all manner of cults and theories, taken up, and dropped, with equal speed.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#51. Forget your religious superstitions built by cults and learn to love for the sake of humanity."-Stated after hearing a man use religion to justify and warrant hatred of people based on differences put forth by his spiritual beliefs. Oddly enough I happen to be very superstitious myself!
Rickey Russell
#52. The history of the Church of Rome is a constant leakage of members into such breakaway cults, which go on splitting.
Mary Douglas
#53. Some churches, sects, cults, or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretation of reality.
Eckhart Tolle
#54. Cult recruiting methods based on dosing victims with the brain chemicals released during capture bonding would make cults even more of a problem than they are now.
Keith Henson
#55. But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.
Alexei Sayle
#56. Be tolerant. Behold the unity of all faiths, cults, creeds and religions. Respect the views, opinions and sentiments of all.
Sivananda
#57. I think cults are probably a little less scary. To me, it's scarier that 25 people would wear robes and jump up and down and try to convert everyone to happiness than a Kool-Aid suicide.
Annie E. Clark
#58. To see how boring you really are, write a book about soap and cults, and the profits you make will be your only means of subsistence.
Chuck Palahniuk
#59. Benedictine spirituality is a consistent one: live life normally, live life thouhtfully, live life profouncly, live life well. Never neglect and never exaggerate. It is a lesson that a world full of cults and fads and workaholics and short courses in difficult subjects needs dearly to learn.
Joan D. Chittister
#60. However, today due to civil litigation funded by cults this option for families has been eliminated. Instead, the only form of cult intervention now practiced is voluntary-with the exception of minor children under the direct supervision of a custodial parent.
Rick Ross
#61. I am not an exponent of expressionism. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. I dislike cults and isms. I want to paint in terms of my own thinking and feeling.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#62. Satan never gets very far from the Bible. And every one of the cults, even Satanism, uses the Bible.
J. Vernon McGee
#63. The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.
Theodore Dalrymple
#64. I'm an atheist .I was raised in British reform Judaism, which is not like American reform Judaism, much less any other strain of organised religion. So: no cults here.
Charles Stross
#65. People under the influence of cults is similar to that we observe in addicts. Typical behaviour for both includes draining bank accounts, neglecting children, destroying relations with family and losing interest in anything except the drug or cult.
Keith Henson
#66. I'm fascinated that people drawn to cults want to know what to do. And people want to know what to think. And people want to know how to feel. Not just what to feel but how to feel.
Stephen Colbert
#67. Cultures that don't laugh at themselves are cults.
Paul Buchheit
#68. Actually there's a very bad trend in some cults about how Guru's are supposed to be mean to their students, and there are some who revel in this and are abusive.
Robert Thurman
#69. The Web is a compelling new medium being put to all kinds of uses, by everyone from banks to Cub Scouts to flying saucer cults. That said, it can also be a powerful folly amplifier.
Paul Saffo
#71. He's losing weight," I say. "He doesn't sleep anymore." It occurs to me that this is how cults weaken the will of initiates.
Robert says, "It sounds to me like he's in love," and adds that the world's most coveted state is characterized by unrelieved insecurity and almost constant pain.
Melissa Bank
#72. I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved.
Keith Henson
#73. The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual.
Pankaj Mishra
#74. I'm actually loving the soundtrack to 'The Secret Circle' that our music supervisor Liza Richardson puts together, like Washed Out and Cults, but my favorite band is Bootstraps.
Shelley Hennig
#75. The only Sundance [2011] film about cults that could actually have life as a cult film, THE WOODS has the greatest comic insight into why our current culture might inspire a search for meaning in the first place.
Karina Longworth
#76. In the countryside where the communal pattern was least disturbed, the new religion found the ground less favorable. The villagers (pagani) and the heath-dwellers (heathen) clung longest to the ancient cults.
Eric Hoffer
#77. I could not undo overnight the damage that had been done to my psyche over many years. The only way over was through-I knew that_ but it was still debilitating and stressful. All I could do was face the fear and keep going.
Carolyn Jessop
#78. Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.
Christopher Hitchens
#80. even admirable human desires for love, for belonging, and for meaning can be manipulated by unscrupulous individuals to benefit themselves
Noah Berlatsky
#81. The hatred that vibrated beneath the surface of my girl's face-- I think Suzanne recognized it. Of course my hand would anticipate the weight of a knife. The particular give of a human body. There was so much to destroy.
Emma Cline
#82. A piece of advice: if you want to remain in control of a doomsday cult, don't give a date for the end of the world unless you're really, really sure it's going to happen. Being wrong tends to undermine your authority.
Jennifer Bosworth
#83. For all his ego and mendacity, Moore is immensely popular. He's got an Oscar, more film awards than we can easily count, and a following whose blindest followers resemble cult members. Like a cult, the Moore movement shares the drive to recruit converts....
David T. Hardy
#84. In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.
Robert Jay Lifton
#85. The formation of Stalin's character is particularly important because the nature of his rule was so personal.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#86. Don't tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh ... And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.
Dan Brown
#87. The Scooby gang doesn't travel because they are looking for crimes to solve. They travel because they're one step ahead of the deprogrammers. Somehow, Fred's got them all snookered. It probably has something to do with the Scooby Snacks.
John Scalzi
#88. Suddenly a dog bayed in the wood, and the dancers stopped, and going up two by two, knelt down, and kissed the man's hands. As they did so, a little smile touched his proud lips, as a bird's wing touches the water and makes it laugh. But there was disdain in it.
Oscar Wilde
#89. As hatred is defined as intense dislike, what is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion, if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?
Rowan Atkinson
#90. It is a disturbing aspect of human nature that if there is a place where there are no consequences and where the most grotesque murders are tolerated in the name of a cult claiming to be a faith, a certain type of person will be attracted to it.
Richard Engel
#91. Everyday in the heat, rain and cold, I ran, alone in the woods ... in the hills near our home. There I felt the gentle touch of God. And I heard His whisper, You're stronger now. It's time to tell the truth of what happened. Tell your story to give someone hope.
Nikki Rosen
#92. A cult!' Elizabeth gasped. 'Here? In Sweet Valley? But that's impossible!
Francine Pascal
#93. Scientology always has been a game of power and control. L. Ron Hubbard was the ultimate con man, and it's hard to figure out how much of Scientology was an experiment in brainwashing and controlling people, and how much of it was truly intended to help people.
Jenna Miscavige Hill
