John McCain Quotes

All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds -- that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.

Heartless zealotry, whether from the religious right or from the teachers' union on the left, is always troubling.

The Right-wingers everywhere take themselves too seriously, whether in the U.S. or the U.K. And, by the way, so does the Left. The Left can take itself a little too seriously as well.

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

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

As a partisan Republican, I am concerned by the fact that the John Birch Society has picked my party ... as a vehicle to promulgate its monolithic philosophy. There are three organizations in this country which give me grave doubts as a citizen: the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society.

By catering ever more abjectly to the noisy, reactionary extremists of our party who are determined to impose their sectarian views and morality on the rest of us, the GOP’s vulnerability among moderate voters, particularly women, continues to intensify.

The right wing of the Conservative Party is one of the most vicious, prejudiced and neolithic animals in British politics

I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the middle.

The extremists are talking too loudly, and everyone is convinced that only he is on the right side.

I'm opposed to fundamentalism in any form.

A left-wing idiot is as dangerous as a right-wing idiot.

Extremism in defense of liberty is not a vice, but I denounce political extremism, of the left or the right, based on duplicity, falsehood, fear, violence and threats when they endanger liberty.

All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.

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

A wingnut is someone on the far-right wing or far-left wing of the political spectrum - the professional partisans, the unhinged activists and the paranoid conspiracy theorists. They're the people who always try to divide rather than unite us.

Each side had its uninformed fanatics. And each side had political leaders who fanned the flames with their rhetoric.

Obstinacy in religious understanding leads to backwardness as in Muslims’, prevalence of violence and intolerance.

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

David Duke is not a Republican. He is a pretender, a charlatan and a political opportunist who is looking for any organization he can find to try to legitimize his views of racial and religious bigotry and intolerance.

We don't really have elections; we fight crusades. Each side usually believes that it, and it alone, represents the true faith.

It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

[The John Birch Society] has attracted a lunatic fringe that is now assuming serious proportions.

You do not compromise with the right wing of the Republican party.