Blaise Pascal Quotes

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding.

I desire what is good. Therefore, everyone who does not agree with me is a traitor.

Faith was intended precisely for the simple, but the quest for certainty and simplicity becomes dangerous when it leads to fanaticism and narrow-mindedness. When reason as such becomes suspect, then faith itself becomes falsified.

No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has "The Truth". To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.

How prone we are to come to the consideration of every question with heads and hearts pre-occupied! How prone to shrink from any opinion, however reasonable, if it be opposed to any, however unreasonable, of our own! How disposed are we to judge, in anger, those who call upon us to think, and encourage us to enquire! To question our prejudices seems nothing less than sacrilege; to break the chains of our ignorance, nothing short of impiety!

I think now with fundamentalists, people who treat belief with a total lack of humor or empathy for any other viewpoint than their own - they, to me, are the enemy. And those people are born out of desperate extremes.

It is as deadly for a mind to have a system as to have none. Therefore it will have to decide to combine both.

Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

Looking back at the worst times [in history], 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 the matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agreed with them.

One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.

There is nothing that dies so hard and rallies so often as intolerance.

There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness.

It comes to pass that men do so magnify their own opinions, and are as censorious of any that differ from them in lesser things

Failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision

The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it.

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.

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.

Certainty is the enemy of mankind. If you're certain about everything, you have the Inquisition, you have Nazis and you have - that certainty is something to be guarded about.

One thing about being narrow-minded: you'll never be lonely.

Bigotry is chronic dogmatism.

Zealots are like one track-pony. Don't get in their way without expecting to get hurt.

He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity. A fool is a natural proselyte, but he must be caught young, for his convictions, unlike those of the wise, harden with age.

No country or people who are slaves to dogma and the dogmatic mentality can progress, and unhappily our country and people have become extraordinarily dogmatic and little-minded

If it be true that men of strong imaginations are usually dogmatists--and I am inclined to think it is so--it ought to follow that men of weak imaginations are the reverse; in which case we should have some compensation for stupidity. But it unfortunately happens that no dogmatist is more obstinate or less open to conviction than a fool.