Mahathir Mohamad Quotes

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

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

For the love of the Faith [Islam] I became enemies of the Hindus and pagans.

It's obvious that humanity continues to be torn by religious violence.

Religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews versus Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians versus Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians versus Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants versus Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims versus Hindus), Sudan (Muslims versus Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims versus Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims versus Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists versus Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims versus Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite versus Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians versus Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis versus Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last 10 years.

In the Middle East, Iraq, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland, and many other places in the world, religion has been so divisive that people have killed one another, believing they were doing the work of God.

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.

Religious conflict can be the bloodiest and cruelest conflicts that turn people into fanatics.

Difference of religion breeds more quarrels than difference of politics.

If you can’t find any Christians or Jews to kill, vent your wrath against the next available Shia.

… they shed the blood of Christians like that of the pagans

In the year 1562 a cloud of black and deadly portent was thickening over France. Surely and swiftly she glided towards the abyss of the religious wars. None could pierce the future, perhaps none dared to contemplate it: the wild rage of fanaticism and hate, friend grappling with friend, brother with brother, father with son; altars profaned, hearth-stones made desolate, the robes of Justice herself bedrenched with murder.

The racial antipathy of the Occidental for the Oriental, the fierce religious hatred of the Christian for the Mohammedan, are motives actuating the Balkan peoples to a degree inconceivable in America.

[The Seljuk Moslems are] an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God…. Exterminate this race from our lands.

If we look back into history for the character of the present sects of Christianity, we shall find that few have not in their turn been persecutors, and complainers of persecution.

There have never been so many civil wars as in the Kingdom of Christ.

Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.

I am absolutely convinced that religion is the main source of hatred in this world.

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

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

If there are Muslims who believe that they've got to kill Christians to make a way for the Islamic faith in the West, not only would they be disappointed, but it will lead to conflict, there's no doubt about that.

There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.

Historically, more people have died of religion than cancer.

The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, that my friends, is true perversion.

Zionism was originally a rebellion against religious Judaism and the PLO Charter was essentially secularist. But because the conflict was allowed to fester without a resolution, religion got sucked into the escalating cycle of violence and became part of the problem.