Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse.

In religious and in secular affairs, the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect - if you're a moderate on abortion, if you're a moderate on gun control, or if you're a moderate in your religious faith - it doesn't evolve into a crusade where you're either right or wrong, good or bad, with us or against us.

I'm intrigued by fanatics - people who are seduced by the promise, or the illusion, of the absolute.

Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, look like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth". To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.

Certainty is the enemy of mankind. If you're certain about everything, you have the Inquisition, you have Nazis and you have - that certainty is something to be guarded about.

I don't believe in Jesus or God. But I do believe that fundamentalists in religion or anything else are bad, and that they have more hate than love.

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

That religious earnestness forever tends toward fright and hence towards brittleness and inquisition is clear enough in mythology and history.

It is not possible to unknow what you do know - the result of that is fanaticism.

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

Moral certainty can deafen people to any truth other than their own.

There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by 'the scientific method.

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.

The sin of certainty leaves no room for the rest of us.

Nothing is so sure of itself as fanaticism.

The mind God is looking for in man is a doubting, questioning mind, not a dogmatic mind; dogmatic reasoning is wrong reasoning. Dogmatic reason ties a huge rock to a man’s foot and stops him forever from advancing.

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth".

The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it.

Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.