Theodor W. Adorno Quotes

Many people believe that the current system must inevitably end in total annihilation. They reject, sometimes very emotionally, any attempts to analyze this notion.

Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe.

If organized religion is the opium of the masses, then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe.

Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda Strain that will destroy us all.

Iran’s rulers are so fanatical and apocalyptic that even nuclear deterrence would have no meaning.

Jihadis want to watch the world burn, to bring everything crashing down, to destroy the establishment and rebuild it after their own pitiless vision. This misguided utopianism is what makes them such effective bogeymen.

A real totalitarianism is at work in the world and wants to impose its views not only on Arab Muslims, but on the West. The same way that they veil women, Islamic radicals want to veil cartoons in the press.

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.

I believe that what we are fighting here is not just a small group of people who have hijacked a religion, but it is a civilization bent on destroying ours.

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

For both faith and want of faith have destroyed men alike.

Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.

The more irrational of us are worried about the millennium ending - as if a date would really matter.

We must recognize the fact that many Nazis, Marxists and Fascists believe passionately in their fundamental rightness, and allow nothing to hinder them from their goal in the pursuit of their mission.

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.

The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.

In the government's eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat.

There are a lot of Christian fundamentalists; there are a lot of Muslim extremists. Every religion - Mormonism - has something way on the side that's completely using the religion as some weird backbone for their twisted faith. It has nothing to do with their religion.

Verses of the Koran and of the Prophet are being isolated and used to justify violence.

There is hardly a form of insanity or delusion that has not been induced by some sort of religious belief.

We came down on them like a flood! We went out among their cities! We tore down the idol-temples, We shat on the Buddha's head!

Fascism is a religion; the twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.

Every book in the City other than the Bible shall be burned..

Extremism and terrorism are based on lack of hope and an ideology that takes advantage of that.

I was initially just fascinated by the Branch Davidians. This doesn't really apply to Rachel Koresh because she was born into the church, and that was all she had ever known, but I was fascinated by the psychology of how people get to that place - a place like Mount Carmel and an FBI stand-off for 51 days.