Tony Campolo Quotes

I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

So many of the people killed in the world have been killed in religious conflicts. There is no more dangerous person in the world than someone who is doing what God has commanded.

The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.

A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case.

How many lives have been lost by men who believe God had commanded them to do so?

I regard Christian and Jewish fundamentalism, and all other forms of fundamentalism, as the enemies of God - and I hope you'll quote me on that.

Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand.

There is a holy, mistaken zeal in politics, as well as in religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.

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

Over the course of history many religions have fallen victim to violent interpretations.

I am dealing with fanaticism.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

The evils which sapped the nation’s strength had all been wrought in the name of religion.

There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality.

There is not a Musselman [Moslem] alive who would not imagine that he was performing an action pleasing to God and his Holy Prophet by exterminating every Christian on earth, while the Christians are scarcely more tolerant on their side.

Religion can turn holy stories into flaming swords.

May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples?

To what excesses do men rush for the sake of religion, of whose truth they are so little persuaded, and to whose precepts they pay so little regard!

The worst thing about religion was religious people.

I don't think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn't already know about religion. It has long been obvious - even to the deeply religious - that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people.

I am thankful that all the people in the world who absolutely, positively, know what God wants, usually kill mostly each other.

It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.