Eric Hoffer Quotes

Jewish extremism and Islamic fanaticism fed each other.

In the Middle East, Iraq, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, and many other places in the world, religion has been so divisive that people have killed one another, believing they were doing the work of God.

[The Seljuk Moslems are] an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God…. Exterminate this race from our lands.

Flee from the Papists as you would from a snake and from the flames of a fire.

I don't hate Muslims. I hate Islam.

Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.

For some unknown reason, this [antiabortion] branch of Christianity cherishes the unborn and hates the living person.

Is it not strange that mankind should so willingly battle for religion and so unwillingly live according to its precepts?

Do you call yourselves Christians? Does then the religion of Him whom you call your Savior inspire your spirit, and guide your practices? Surely not. It is recorded of him that a bruised reed he never broke. Cease, then, to call yourselves Christians, lest you declare to the world your hypocrisy. Cease, too, to call other nations savage, when you are tenfold more the children of cruelty than they.

God's everywhere, but I gotta go down (to church) to see him? Really? And he's mad at me down there, and I owe you money?

I really wished he hadn't made me hate to read the Bible. Having it shoved down my throat all my life had made me bitter toward reading it. I believed it, but my dad had used it to his benefit too many times and ignored the parts in there that would point out his wrongs. Like judging Beau without even knowing him. That was in the Bible too.

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics/ And the Catholics hate the Protestants/ And the Hindus hate the Muslims/ And everybody hates the Jews.

The most striking contradiction of our civilization is the fundamental reverence for truth which we profess and the thorough-going disregard for it which we practice.

The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American Left who hates Christendom... What I'm talking about is onward American soldiers. What we're talking about are core American values.

The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.

The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that's how it should be.

I think religion has always tried to turn hatred towards gay people. Religion promotes the hatred and spite against gays. But there are so many Christian people I know who are gay and love their religion...

In England Giordano Bruno had given lectures on the plurality of worlds, and in that country had written, in Italian, his most important works. It added not a little to the exasperation against him, that he was perpetually declaiming against the insincerity, the impostures, of his persecutors - that wherever he went he found skepticism varnished over and concealed by hypocrisy; and that it was not against the belief of men, but against their pretended belief, that he was fighting; that he was struggling with an orthodoxy that had neither morality nor faith.

It is a first class human tragedy that people of the earth who claim to believe in the message of Jesus, whom they describe as the Prince of Peace, show little of that belief in actual practice.

Italianate Englishmen are incarnate devils ... for they first lustfully condemn God, then scornfully mock his word, and also spitefully hate and hurt all the well wishers thereof.... They count as fables the holy mysteries of religion.

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do

Some go to Church, proud humbly to repent, And come back much more guilty than they went: One way they look, another way they steer, Pray to the Gods; but would have Mortals hear; And when their sins they set sincerely down, They'll find that their Religion has been one.

Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God.

I hate ingratitude more in a man than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, or any taint of vice whose strong corruption inhabits our frail blood".

Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it's not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.