Ilka Chase Quotes

That religious earnestness forever tends toward fright and hence towards brittleness and inquisition is clear enough in mythology and history.

The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings.

Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and overzealous piety.

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.

Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

She died of galloping Christianity of the malignant California type.

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!

Everybody knows that fanaticism is religion caricatured; bears, indeed, about the same relation to it that a monkey bears to a man; yet, with many, contempt of fanaticism is received as a sure sign of hostility to religion.

Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.

The most rabidly religious people are the most rabidly evil.

I think religion is a mistake - I'm exhausted by its self-righteousness. I think atheists should start screaming for attention like religious folks do.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The slayers of the heretics are the worst heretics of all.

[Religious] superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.

My skepticism warns me of the danger of becoming a fanatic, a danger which no faith has yet averted.

Fanaticism is the danger of the world, and always has been, and has done untold harm. I might almost say that I was fanatical against fanaticism.

Any faith of more than 1.6 billion people is going to have some of them who falsely justify actions on that faith.

Religious extremism. We hear about it all the time. We see it all the time. Heck, most of us are just sick of talking about it all the time.

I really don't want to offend anybody, but I find all forms of religious fundamentalism frightening.

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