George Orwell Quotes

You're always going to have extremists in every religion.

We’re not fighting for Christianity but against human fanaticism of all kinds.

Yes, we do have extremists and fanatics, just like the rest of the world. Our first step should be to stop denying this fact. And our second step should be to confront these extremists. We must tell them that they are part of a system, and that they have to respect the voice of the majority…

Fanaticism and extremism cannot grow on an earth whose soil is embedded in the spirit of tolerance, moderation, and balance.

From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.

Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right

In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds -- that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.

My feeling is that the most dangerous people are always those who take a hardline position - and nothing inspires that sort of extremism like difference.

In every religion, you find the same extremists.

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.

Fierce sectarianism breeds fierce latitudinarianism.

I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism…The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.

We are all capable of becoming fundamentalists because we get addicted to other people's wrongness.

I have never in my life encountered a religion as oppressive, cold, and stiff as Progressivism. I've never known a faith more eager to burn heretics at the stake. Even a fundamentalist Iranian Muslim would flinch if he came face to face with a western liberal's rigid dogmatism. I imagine that even a Saudi Arabian Islamic cleric would take one look at how American left wingers react when anyone deviates ever so slightly from their established orthodoxy, and say to himself, 'man, these people REALLY need to chill.

The qualities most needed are charity and tolerance, not some form of fanatical faith such as is offered to us by the various rampant isms

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

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.

People kill and are killed because they cling too tightly to their own beliefs and ideologies. When we believe that ours is the only faith that contains the truth, violence and suffering will surely be the result.

Evil is international and the fanatic is international and universal. There is no difference between a Muslim fanatic, a Christian fanatic, even a secular fanatic.

These individuals are tyrants, and so they hate democracy. They are bigots, zealots, and persecutors, and so they hate Americas freedom tolerance, and respect for all people. The terrorists of Sept. 11 live and flourish in darkness. They cannot survive in the liberating and inspirational sunlight of American freedom and democracy.

They who get off on tangents and ride hobby horses to death are they who become fanatic. Let them understand that they must be tolerant of others faults but never accept as justifiable their own.

The fanatic has the courage of his conviction and the intolerance of his courage. He is opposed to the death penalty for murder, but he would willingly have anyone electrocuted who disagreed with him on the subject.

I think now with fundamentalists, people who treat belief with a total lack of humor or empathy for any other viewpoint than their own - they, to me, are the enemy. And those people are born out of desperate extremes.

They [zealots] would have everybody be as blind as themselves: to them, to be clear-sighted is libertinism.