Sigmund Freud Quotes

It is in the uncomprisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma that the danger lies.

Those prepared to die for the truth, as a rule make many others die with them, often before them, and at times instead of them.

Religion has both bolstered and undermined stable self-government. It has advanced political reform and human rights, but also induced irrationality, extremism, and terrorism.

Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.

Senseless violence is, almost by definition, hard to understand. Not that I can understand terrorists who kill from hate, but at least we can identify a reason - a terrifying one, to be sure, grounded in a violent belief system - for what they do. Two gangs go to war. Extremists kill in the name of belief.

The fanatics should know that we hold our beliefs just as deeply as they hold theirs.

If you are a Christian, you are in danger. Even if you are an atheist, you are in danger, and if you decide to convert to Islam, this will not save you, either, because traditional Islam is inimical to the conditions and objectives set by them [the terrorists]. If you are prepared to become a most radical Islamist and are prepared to circumcise yourself, I invite you to come to Moscow. I will recommend having the operation done in such a way that nothing will grow for you there anymore.

Terrorists are dangerous, not because they are immoral or amoral but because they are hyper moral. They justify their behavior in profoundly moral language.

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

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.

Mother of my son, be hopeful and patient. We will meet in heaven. I will die for my nation to live. I will be alive in heaven. Just one push on the trigger and I’m over, Thus disfiguring the face of the enemies. May the faces of those who don’t fear God be disfigured, The faces of those who don’t defend Him.

If al-Qaida is Muslim, then I am Buddha.

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth".

Most unfortunately, none among us arise as reformers save that they depart from moderation into extremism, and the call cannot succeed with extremism. The Wahhabis undertook reform, and their sect would be good were it not for their extremism and excess. What need is there for their call that the tomb of the Prophet be destroyed? Or their assertion that all other Muslims are infidels? Or that they must be extirpated?

Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.

Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word.

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

It's always been hard for me to understand how we say people who support Osama Bin Laden or someone else like him – who are willing to give their lives to destroy the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia – how we can describe those people as people who hated freedom. It seems to me that their definition of freedom might be different than ours, but to oppose a dictatorship, one must want freedom in some kind of way.

Extremism and terrorism are based on lack of hope and an ideology that takes advantage of that.

I'm not even religious, but I get fanaticism. I get the appeal of it.

The themes that I explore, Taika Waititi also explores: how teaching children a sense of 'us and them' breeds a sense of superiority and dehumanises what one perceives as 'otherness'; and why this theme is relevant to today's rise in the far-Right, how children and youth are indoctrinated into extremism and terrorism.

Religion [is] the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity

We want to go further than preventing people from becoming terrorists and focus on a broader approach to counter-extremism - both violent and non-violent.