Louise Berliawsky Nevelson Quotes

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.

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.

Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.

I'm one extreme or the other. I'm not good at doing moderation.

The political system loves the extremes, it doesn't so much show a lot love for the moderates.

Zealots often carry the day.

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

I'm a fan of polarization. If you make something that is palatable to everybody, it's like making vanilla ice cream, and I think we have enough of that.

Americans are either wild or dull.

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.

The address was couched in the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language of the fanatic…pursuing the promptings of fanaticism even to the dismemberment of the Government with the horrors of civil war.

We don't really have elections; we fight crusades. Each side usually believes that it, and it alone, represents the true faith.

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

Men whose religion was excessively zealous split themselves into opposing factions, and once divided by a single mistake they disagreed on everything and came to be entirely at odds with one another.

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

The extremists are talking too loudly, and everyone is convinced that only he is on the right side.

Heartless zealotry, whether from the religious right or from the teachers' union on the left, is always troubling.

The obsession with moderation is the spirit of castrated narrow-mindedness.

I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, 'I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.'

How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.

The moderate are not usually the most sincere, for the same circumspection which makes them moderate makes them likewise retentive of what could give offence.

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.

I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess.

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

Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics.