Mercedes Lackey Quotes

A fanatic's willingness to kill or be killed in the service of a cause cannot prove the rightness of that cause.

In my humble opinion, propaganda is one of the most evil tools humans have used against humans throughout history to justify wars, justify atrocities, justify evil. ISIS has taken it to a new extreme.

I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.

The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.

We cannot sway extremists with rational thought or with our ideas of right and wrong.

I think that anybody can become a terrorist. That's my point of view. But, not everybody can actually kill. In order to reach that level, you have to be deeply convinced.

Once a person has killed other people on behalf of an ideology, he becomes rather devoted to it.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Senseless violence is, almost by definition, hard to understand. Not that I can understand terrorists who kill from hate, but at least we can identify a reason - a terrifying one, to be sure, grounded in a violent belief system - for what they do. Two gangs go to war. Extremists kill in the name of belief.

It is a struggle for the minds of the people... No cause justifies recourse to terrorism.

Terrorists are dangerous, not because they are immoral or amoral but because they are hyper moral. They justify their behavior in profoundly moral language.

The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motive.

The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.

Men will die for an opinion as soon as for anything else.

They are fuelled by an ideology that itself is non-negotiable and forms a continuum that links peaceful, law-abiding but nevertheless intensely ideological Muslims at one end and murderous jihadists at the other.

We don't tolerate terrorism. We go after the terrorists and those who support them and those who justify their actions.

Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

It is an ideology born out of hatred and its adherents belong to no religion, culture or civilisation.

Only fanatics — in religion as well as in politics — can find a meaning in someone else’s death.

As for those that carried out these attacks there are no adequate words of condemnation. Their barbarism will stand as their shame for all eternity.

Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.

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.