Top 100 Quotes About Fanaticism
#1. FANATICISM is, to superstition, what delirium is to fever, and fury to anger : he who has ecstasies and visions, who takes dreams for realities, and imaginations for prophecies, is an enthusiast ; and he, who sticks not at supporting his folly by murder, is a fanatic.
Voltaire
#2. You desire a popular art? Begin by having a "people" whose minds are liberated, a people not crushed by misery and ceaseless toil, not brutalized by every superstition and every fanaticism, a people of itself, and victor in the fight that is being waged today.
Romain Rolland
#3. But The Same Sea is set precisely in this Israel, which never makes it to the news headlines anywhere. It is a novel about everyday people far removed from fundamentalism, fanaticism nationalism, or militancy of any sort.
Amos Oz
#4. It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.
Baron D'Holbach
#5. Am I a criminal? The world knows I'm not a criminal. What are they trying to put me in jail for? You've lost common sense in this society because of religious fanaticism and dogma.
Jack Kevorkian
#6. The lust of conquest, when associated with religious fanaticism, has been the greatest scourge of the human race.
William Deans
#7. I give no shit to what extent they believe in superstitions and fanaticism. But I will fight till death, if their fallacious belief hurts any individual.
M.F. Moonzajer
#8. The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others
Iain Banks
#9. I believe that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior when it comes to religious fanaticism.
Sam Brower
#10. Embrace fanaticism. Harness joie de vivre by pursuing insane interests, consuming passions, and constant sources of gratification that do not depend on the approval of others
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#11. Since total skepticism about ultimate beliefs is strictly impossible, in that no belief can be doubted except on the basis of some other belief, indifference is always in danger of giving place to some sort of fanaticism that can be as intolerant as any religion has ever been.
Lesslie Newbigin
#12. There cannot be a censor, or a censorship that does not degenerate into absurdity and corruption, there never has been, and there never will be and of all the excuses for it that there could be, that it protects superstition, and religious fanaticism would be the worst.
Christopher Hitchens
#13. I was only the more anxious to make Jerusalem a city like the others, where several races and several beliefs could live in peace; but I was wrong to forget that in any combat between fanaticism and common sense the latter has rarely the upper hand.
Marguerite Yourcenar
#14. From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
Denis Diderot
#15. The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine.
Adolf Hitler
#16. In the history of mankind, fanaticism has caused more harm than vice.
Louis Kronenberger
#17. From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.
Charles Baudelaire
#18. The future of a movement is conditioned by the fanaticism, yes, the intolerance, with which its adherents uphold it as the sole correct movement, and push it past other formations of a similar sort.
Adolf Hitler
#19. We've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith.I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism.
Adam Gopnik
#21. A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will, and the whole-souled ardour of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions.
Gustave Le Bon
#22. In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.
Anna Jameson
#23. Modern fanaticism thrives in proportion to the quanitity of contradictions and nonsense it poures down the throats of the gaping multitude, and the jargon and mysticism it offers to their wonder and credulity.
William Hazlitt
#24. Sensible conservatism is better than arrogant and stupid fanaticism.
Neville Stocks
#25. One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as Scripture religion is could never have obtained credit; yet we have seen what priestcraft and fanaticism can do, and credulity believe.
Thomas Paine
#26. People with a goal. Such people would be easy to imbue with fervor and fanaticism.
Frank Herbert
#27. The line between faith and fanaticism is a constantly shifting one," Dr. Poblocki said. "When does belief become justification? When does right become rationale and crusade become crime?
Libba Bray
#28. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains.
Joseph Conrad
#29. There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes opposition a torment.
Mary Augusta Ward
#30. Muslims are the first victims of Islam. Many times I have observed in my travels in the Orient that fanaticism comes from a small number of dangerous men who maintain the others in the practice of religion by terror. To liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service one can render him.
Ernest Renan
#31. The monster, fanaticism, still exists, and whoever seeks after truth will run the risk of being persecuted.
Voltaire
#32. There is such a thing as fanaticism, it is always wrong, and if you disagree, you're wrong too.
Julian Baggini
#33. The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists .
John Maynard Keynes
#34. Fanaticism is redoubling your effort after you've forgotten your aim.
George Santayana
#35. Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go ...
Marianne Moore
#36. The vast majority of Muslims living here are peaceful citizens. Unfortunately, however, we also see religious and political fanaticism among Muslim groups in Germany.
Otto Schily
#37. That Solidarity was a religious movement no one, least of all the Soviets, can deny. In November 1981, Pravda denounced 'religious fanaticism' as a grave challenge to socialism; failure to contain it, Pravda said, was at the root of the problems in Poland.
Charles Colson
#38. The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.
John C. Calhoun
#39. Fanatics, as a class, have far more zeal than intellect and are fanatics only because they have. There can be no fanaticism but where there is more passion than reason; and hence, in the nature of things, movements originating in it run down in a short time by their folly and extravagance.
John C. Calhoun
#40. The Germans are not a race of psychopaths, Alma. They're normal people like you and me, but with fanaticism, power, and impunity, anyone can turn into a monster, like the SS at Auschwitz, he told his sister.
Isabel Allende
#41. Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries
slave of prejudice ... slave of religious fanaticism ... slave of barbarity and inhumanity.
Saadat Hasan Manto
#42. It was another of the essential ingredients that she felt her son needed: people with a goal. Such people would be easy to imbue with fervor and fanaticism. They could be wielded like a sword to win back Paul's place for him.
Frank Herbert
#43. It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity.
P.D. James
#44. Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances. It is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.
Voltaire
#45. Not even on the most distorted and contracted theory of good which ever was framed by religious or philosophical fanaticism, can the government of Nature be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and omnipotent.
John Stuart Mill
#47. We often excuse our own want of philanthropy by giving the name of fanaticism to the more ardent zeal of others.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#48. The utmost zeal for Christ is consistent with common-sense and reason: raving, ranting, and fanaticism are products of another zeal which is not according to knowledge.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#49. Fanaticism was so popular. There had to be a reason for that, didn't there? Some vast reward to the end of thinking, some great bliss to the blessing of idiocy.
Steven Erikson
#50. Superstition changes a man to a beast, fanaticism makes him a wild beast, and despotism a beast of burden.
Jean-Francois De La Harpe
#51. Human nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim of some kind; as the sanity of the Old Testament truly said, where there is no vision the people perish. But it is precisely because an ideal is necessary to man that the man without ideals is in permanent danger of fanaticism.
G.K. Chesterton
#52. In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
Daniel Dennett
#53. It was a fabled railway that was the issue of desperation and fanaticism, made as much of myth and unreality as it was to be of wood and iron and the thousands upon thousands of lives that were to be laid down over the next year to build it. But what reality was ever made by realists?
Richard Flanagan
#54. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith ... Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.
David Foster Wallace
#55. As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.
Georges Bizet
#56. I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.
Cynthia Ozick
#57. My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery, or ceasing to prate on the rights of man.
William Lloyd Garrison
#58. Football fanaticism and high intellect seldom go together.
Hugh MacDiarmid
#59. There being in the make of an English mind a certain gloom and eagerness, which carries to the sad extreme; religion to fanaticism; free-thinking to atheism; liberty to rebellion.
George Berkeley
#60. If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God.
Richard Rohr
#61. Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt
C. G. Jung
#62. Religion only helps; until and unless it degenerates into either ritualism or fanaticism, or worse the both!
Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre
#63. We call for an end to the killing of one another, and we denounce the violence and fanaticism that threatens life. The victory of the resurrection must be experienced as a victory of life, of brotherhood, of the future, of hope.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I Of Constantinople
#64. Faith was intended precisely for the simple, but the quest for certainty and simplicity becomes dangerous when it leads to fanaticism and narrow-mindedness. When reason as such becomes suspect, then faith itself becomes falsified.
Pope Benedict XVI
#66. In my midteens I went through a brief stage of religious fanaticism, but it was very much about just saying prayers and stuff like that, reciting rosaries and spending a lot of time on that kind of Catholic ritual.
Robert Crumb
#67. Fanaticism is the greatest threat today. Literally, the 21st century threatened by fanatics, and we have fanatics in every religion, unfortunately, and what can we do against them? Words nothing else, I'm against violence but only words.
Elie Wiesel
#68. There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.
Diarmaid MacCulloch
#69. There is a certain mentality that believes in covering up. They believe in it with the sincerity and fanaticism that members of some religious groups believe in the divinity of Jesus. Because, for some people, the necessity to continue covering up even after the damage is done is all-important.
Stephen King
#70. I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.
Edward Teller
#71. The rain's been racing earthwards as if with some religious or political fanaticism. The clouds have the look of dark internal bleeding. Surely you lot look up from Cosmo while this sort of thing's going on? Surely you take a Playstation break?
Glen Duncan
#72. I'm for open-mindedness and tolerance. I'm against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of 'We have the truth.' The truth is far too large and complex. Nobody has the truth.
Philip Pullman
#73. Fanaticism, or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only powerful and active so long as it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and it becomes conservatism, whether it will or no.
James Russell Lowell
#74. A man should always observe fanaticism when he gets the chance.
Charles Willeford
#75. Women, rouse yourselves! The tocsin of reason resounds through the whole universe: recognize your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudices, fanaticism, superstition and lies.
Olympe De Gouges
#76. Despair breeds fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. A world of truly shared abundance would be a safer world.
Starhawk
#77. The atmosphere of war brutalizes everyone involved, begets a fanaticism in which the original moral factor is buried at the bottom of a heap of atrocities committed by all sides.
Howard Zinn
#78. Try all things by the written word, and let all bow down before it. You are in danger of [fanaticism] every hour, if you depart ever so little from Scripture; yea, or from the plain, literal meaning of an text, taken in connection with the context.
John Wesley
#79. Will anything but fanaticism make for change? Wisdom and compromise come later.
Dorothy Gilman
#80. If you do not join the polluted, then you are pure; if you reject society in search of purity, that is not purity but fanaticism.
Zicheng Hong
#81. There can be no fanatics in the cause of genuine liberty. Fanaticism is excessive zeal. There may be, and have been fanatics in false religion - in the bloody religions of the heathen.
Thaddeus Stevens
#82. Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.
Marquis De Sade
#83. Fanaticism and Ignorance is forever busy and needs feeding.
Jerome Lawrence
#84. He said: "It's possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism when they come separately. When you get all three together it's probably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity." They
P.D. James
#85. Religious fanaticism is simply good politics in the middle-eastern countries.
James Aldridge
#86. There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there's poverty; there's political repression; there's gender apartheid - there's a sense of culture loss; there's religious fanaticism.
Lawrence Wright
#87. It is nothing but fanaticism and beautiful soulism to expect very much (or even, much only) from humanity when it has forgotten how to wage war.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#88. Which is more dangerous: fanaticism or atheism? Fanaticism is certainly a thousand times more deadly; for atheism inspires no bloody passion whereas fanaticism does; atheism is opposed to crime and fanaticism causes crimes to be committed.
Voltaire
#89. Do not men believe that God means what he appears plainly to have asserted? or, if we believe that he means it, do we fear the charge of fanaticism if we openly avow that we take him at his word?
George Muller
#90. All in all, this whole period of winter 1919-20 was a single struggle to strengthen confidence in the victorious might of the young movement and raise it to that fanaticism of faith which can move mountains.
Adolf Hitler
#91. Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.
Adam Gopnik
#92. It is not that religion is merely useless, it is mischievous. It is mischievous by its idle terrors; it is mischievous by its false morality; it is mischievous by its hypocrisy; by its fanaticism; by its dogmatism; by its threats; by its hopes; by its promises.
Frances Wright
#93. Buddhism strongly discourages blind faith and fanaticism.
Dalai Lama
#94. What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed tomorrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.
Wendell Phillips
#96. Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench.
Baha'u'llah
#97. As for the second notion, the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this our culture; it is rooted in our history
Robert A. Heinlein
#98. It took 200 years for the Crusaders to create [this] Muslim fanaticism. It was the exact imitation of Christian intolerance.
Terry Jones
#99. Today's Islamic fundamentalism is also a cover for political motifs. We should not overlook the political motifs we encounter in forms of religious fanaticism.
Jurgen Habermas
#100. Europeans know that their great experiment in building peace, unity and prosperity cannot survive as a privileged enclave, surrounded on its outskirts by breeding grounds of hatred and fanaticism.
Dick Cheney
