Emil Cioran Quotes

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.

Those prepared to die for the truth, as a rule make many others die with them, often before them, and at times instead of them.

Terror … is often the result of giving politics a sacred, absolute dimension.

The slayers of the heretics are the worst heretics of all.

If my son were to oppose the Catholic Church, I myself would carry the faggots to burn him.

I think loathing begets fanaticism, and in the end, loathing begets hatred and violence.

History proves that those who seed extremist ideologies reap a bitter harvest.

In all places, and in all times, those religionists who have believed too much have been more inclined to violence and persecution than those who have believed too little.

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.

I know one or two things about fanaticism and death, and I reject them.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Fanaticism, to which men are so much inclined, has always served not only to render them more brutalized but more wicked.

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.

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

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

It's impossible to consider living without ideals. However, when ideas lead to ideology, that's a very dangerous thing. Ideology then leads to creating the image of an enemy, and it leads to the murder and massacre that we've seen since the beginning of time.

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

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.

All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.

All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.

There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.

Looking back at the worst times [in history], 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 the matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agreed with them.

We cannot judge Christianity by the Ku Klux Klan and we cannot judge Islam by the Taliban.

… ready to riot and slay for the sake of fanaticism …. detesting Europeans with a bigoted, foolish, senseless hatred …