Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

My mom always said that if the Protestants catch a Catholic in their church, they feed them to the Jews.

No religion has mandated killing others as a requirement for its sustenance or promotion.

I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else. We have lethal Sunni v Shia, Catholic against Protestant, but no agnostic suicide bombers attack crowded atheist pubs.

Once started religious strife has a tendency to go on and on, to become permanent feuds.

If the Shiites in a Sunni-dominated country insisted on practicing their religion openly, then … the Sunni state had no choice but to wage war on them.

Neither experience nor improvement can root out the inveterate prejudices of the Roman Catholics, or render them less cruel or inexorable to Protestants.

Of course in 1789 to have killed three Protestants was counted a passport into heaven in the vicinity of Vinegar Hill [Ireland].

The Catholics and Protestants … are occupied in nothing but cutting each other’s throats.

Religious fanaticism has clearly produced, and in all probability will continue to produce, enormous amounts of bickering, fighting, violence, bloodshed, homicide, feuds, wars, and genocide.

What is wrong with inciting intense dislike of a religion if the activities or teachings of that religion are so outrageous, irrational or abusive of human rights that they deserve to be intensely disliked?

To Arab Sunni Islamists, Iranians are gabrs (Zoroastrians) while Shi'ites, including Arab ones, are rafidis (heretics) who must be “re-converted” or put to death.

Well, it has done terrifying things. Religious ideas are inflammatory in a way that I find difficult to understand. There are very few wars over the theory of relativity. Very few heated arguments, for that matter. Whereas, in Northern Ireland, they are killing one another over religion.

... we must drive them [Jews] out like mad dogs, so that we do not become partakers of their abominable blasphemy and all the their other vices and thus merit God's wrath and be damned with them.

You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell.

Here we now have the freedom of all religions, and I hope that never again will we have a repetition of religious bigotry, as we have had in certain periods of our own history. There is no room for that kind of foolishness here.

Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.

I don't like to speak of Islamic violence, because every day, when I browse the newspapers, I see violence, here in Italy... this one who has murdered his girlfriend, another who has murdered the mother-in-law... and these are baptized Catholics! There are violent Catholics!

There are only two things in which the false professors of all religions have agreed--to persecute all other sects and to plunder their own.

Even today a crude sort of persecution is all that is required to create an honorable name for any sect, no matter how indifferent in itself.

We have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith. Professed to stand up for Islam, but in fact are betraying it. Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.

In Constantinople, more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in the years 342-343 than by all the persecutions by pagans in the history of Rome.

There's only two classes of people: terrorists and non-terrorists. Terrorists come in every flavour: there are Buddhist terrorists right now killing Rohingya in Burma! Buddhists! They're not allowed to kill bugs.

[There has been] every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

The Catholics had been in the position of oppressors, and the Protestants of the oppressed

Torrents of blood have been spilt in the world in vain attempts of the secular arm to extinguish religious discord, by proscribing all differences in religious opinions.