Quotes About Zealotry

#1. We shouldn't let anti-science zealotry shut down the ability to produce low-cost, quality food for billions across the globe.

Ted Cruz

#2. The unmistakable lesson is that such is the myopic zealotry of environmentalists like Obama that they would implement policies virtually guaranteed to harm our economy significantly, even when they offer no promise of appreciable environmental benefits.

David Limbaugh

#3. Moderation is a wiser policy than zealotry

Christopher Paolini

#4. 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

#5. I'm convinced that the most important division in human affairs is probably not the one between left and right, liberal and conservative. It's the one between zealotry and understanding, between absolute conviction and compromise, between preachers and politicians.

Bill Keller

#6. Nobody wants zealotry in a police force, you know? You do want to know that the guy who's got that badge, is confident enough to judge a certain level of benign corruption. Like a man steals some food to feed his starving children.

Russell Crowe

#7. To the American people I say, awaken to what is happening. It is the duty of each citizen to be vigilant, to protect liberty, to speak out, left and right and disagree lest be trampled underfoot by misguided zealotry and extreme partisanship.

Robert Byrd

#8. 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.

Norman G. Finkelstein

#9. I was always a doubter when it came to religion. How irrational of me, then, to love a zealot. But then, both love and zealotry are irrational states of mind.

Octavia E. Butler

#10. Jesus was crucified by Rome because his messianic aspirations threatened the occupation of Palestine, and his zealotry endangered the Temple authorities.

Reza Aslan

#11. The enemy of idealism is zealotry.

Neil Kinnock

#12. Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

Theodore Roosevelt

#13. Let eloquence be flung to the dogs rather than souls be lost. What we want is to win souls. They are not won by flowery speeches.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#14. Religious practice in the Land of the Bible tends to encourage exclusivity and discrimination rather than love and magnanimity. There is no place like the Holy Land to make one cynical about religion.

Raja Shehadeh

#15. You know all about love, but that is not enough. You must also learn that hate comes from God as well, that it too is in the Lord's service. And in times like these, with the world fallen to the state it has, hate serves God more than love.

Nikos Kazantzakis

#16. From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

Salman Rushdie

#17. Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

Salman Rushdie

#18. The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.

Sarah Vowell

#19. Zeal was like gas, most dangerous when you could not see it. The wrong spark could light it at any time.

Frances Hardinge

#20. Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.

Anne Rice

#21. The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he'll fight and die for it.
[As quoted in The New Yorker, April 25, 2011]

Francis Crick

#22. It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.

Anatole France

#23. The politics of the possible was being replaced by the politics of purity.

H.W. Brands

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

Michael Crichton

#25. Give a man with a death wish a bottle of whisky and a loaded gun, you get a dead body. Give a martyr a quote from scripture and a pocket full of
prayers and you get a room full of corpses.

Kevis Hendrickson

#26. 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.

K.W. Jeter

#27. 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.

Joseph Campbell

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

Carl Sagan

#29. Author conveys contemporary respect for Methodist preachers who rode the circuit of frontier settlements to put themselves at risk for the Gospel near the Second Great Awakening. They were dubbed 'God's light artillery'.

Nancy Pearcey

#30. Today's zealots are mostly those pretending to be anti-religious.

Criss Jami

#31. Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.

Eleanor Roosevelt