Adam Gopnik Quotes

We are politically correct, we are afraid to address the problem. Because if you address the problem like I do, people like you call us evil extreme, or you're being taken to court or you will get death threats in your life.

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.

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.

Fanaticism, or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only powerful and active so long as it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and it becomes conservatism, whether it will or no.

Everything I give, pretty much, is public. Not every donor wants to - or is willing to get the kind of abuse and attacks that we do, or death threats, so they're not willing to have their names out. I think the other side is pushing for that because they want to intimidate people so they won't oppose it.

Every time somebody says 'Islamophobia' it gives the people who are intimidating cover.

If one more 'journalist' makes a cavalier statement about me and my band, I will personally or with my fans' help, greet them at their home and discover just how much they believe in their freedom of speech.

Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.

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.

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

Religiosity is suffocating in Pakistan. It invariably stokes the fire in driving society to religious extremism.

I am an extremist.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

People sometimes pay with their lives for saying aloud what they think. In fact, one can even get killed for giving me information. I am not the only one in danger. I have examples that prove it.

One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.

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.

Fanaticism is a fire, which heats the mind indeed, but heats without purifying. It stimulates and ferments all the passions; but it rectifies none of them.

Earnestness is good; it means business. But fanaticism overdoes, and is consequently reactionary.

I think people resist feminism because they're scared. I think for women, they're scared of being picked on or of being called out.

There are only a few safe targets left, just a few groups of people you can say anything negative about without getting in trouble for it. I've made a list of safe targets and I probably ought to stick to those. Politicians, for instance. You can say anything you want about them, and it doesn't matter how unfair you are. People seem to like it.

I think that people don't make the most of their lives. So, you know, for me, it seems like it's the beginning of me rattling the cage, of making some people nervous. And people are strategically trying to do things to mute my voice in some way or make me look like I'm a lunatic or pinpoint the inaccuracies in my grammar to somehow take away from the overall message of what I'm saying.

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

Fanaticism is not a state of religion but a state of mind.

Everything has become very corporate and very careful. Before we had a real democracy going and there were a lot of freedoms and now there's this terrorism thing that everybody's focused on, which is really a boondoggle in my opinion. It's just an excuse to clamp down on people's free speech. And corporations intimidate people and everybody's gotten intimidated and that's really what it is, and they just keep going along. It's almost like - a little bit like that Charlie Chaplin movie, Modern Times, or 1984, Orwell

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.