{"quotes":[{"text":"Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.","author":"Umberto Eco","tags":["fanaticism","prophets","religion"],"id":8284,"author_id":"Umberto+Eco"},{"text":"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 whol.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["boyhood","causes","childhood","christian-martyrs","christianity","comrades","conscription","death","fanaticism","friends","kamikaze","martyrdom","martyrs","masochism","memorials","november","orwell","patriotism","poppies","principles","religion","sacrifice","self-abnegation","self-importance","soldiers","suicide","suicide-attack","theocracy","torture","ugliness","war"],"id":11922,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"It is more difficult to undermine faith than knowledge, love succumbs to change less than to respect, hatred is more durable than aversion, and at all times the driving force of the most important changes in this world has been found less in a scientific knowledge animating the masses, but rather in a fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drove them forward.","author":"Adolf Hitler","tags":["aversion","crowd-control","crowds","domination","faith","fanaticism","hatred","hitler","hypnosis","hysteria","knowledge","love","mass-suggestion","nazis","psychology","respect"],"id":53372,"author_id":"Adolf+Hitler"},{"text":"It is also the irrational instinct of religionism, the vague yearning for something to worship—a reflection or shadow of the true devotional principle—which prompts men to project a subjective image of the lower, personal mind, and to endow it with human attributes, and then to claim to receive 'revelations' from it; and this—the image of the Beast, or unspiritual mind,—is their anthropomorphic God, a fabulous monster the worship of which has ever prompted men to fanaticism and persecution, and has inflicted untold misery and dread upon the masses of mankind, as well as physical torture and death in hideous forms upon the many martyrs who have refused to bend the knee to this Gorgonean phantom of the beast-mind of man. Truly, where the worshipers of this image of the Beast predominate, the man whose brow and hand are unbranded by this superstition, who neither thinks nor acts in accordance with it, suffers ostracism if not virulent persecution.","author":"James Morgan Pryse","tags":["13-13-18","1910","apocalypse","beast","fanaticism","gorgon","idolatry","revelation","subjugation","superstition"],"id":54684,"author_id":"James+Morgan+Pryse"},{"text":"Most ardent reformers are accompanied by but equal portion of dullness . John Quincy Adams.","author":"Paul C. Nagel","tags":["communication","fanaticism","obsession"],"id":56513,"author_id":"Paul+C.+Nagel"},{"text":"Fanatics are like debris following the course of the wind, they are swept around like sand, and convinced to believe in what they do not understand.","author":"Michael Bassey Johnson","tags":["course","diehard","dogma","dogmatism","extremist","false","fanatic","fanaticism","follower","ignorance","lies","michael-bassey-johnson","misgiving","misuderstanding","path","religion","stoop","untruth","wind"],"id":57710,"author_id":"Michael+Bassey+Johnson"},{"text":"Religious fanaticism and hatred are a world-devouring fire, whose violence none can quench.","author":"Bahá'u'lláh","tags":["fanaticism","hate"],"id":65774,"author_id":"Bah%C3%A1%27u%27ll%C3%A1h"},{"text":"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.","author":"Mercedes Lackey","tags":["fanaticism","fantasy","prejudice","religion","truth"],"id":88109,"author_id":"Mercedes+Lackey"},{"text":"In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood.","author":"Umberto Eco","tags":["christianity","fanaticism","prophets","religion"],"id":88705,"author_id":"Umberto+Eco"},{"text":"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. Your life?","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["boyhood","causes","childhood","christian-martyrs","christianity","comrades","conscription","death","fanaticism","friends","kamikaze","martyrdom","martyrs","masochism","memorials","november","orwell","patriotism","poppies","principles","religion","sacrifice","self-abnegation","self-importance","soldiers","suicide","suicide-attack","theocracy","torture","ugliness","war"],"id":95133,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":54,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}