Maynard James Keenan Quotes

Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.

No one who isn't an extremist can understand the mind of an extremist.

I'm an extremist? I don't think so. I think people that call me an extremist are extremely brain dead and soulless.

The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.

Cults, or related social movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, result in massive military expenses.

We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think religion stops people from thinking. I think it justified crazies.

I am dealing with fanaticism.

Extremist thought is about to overwhelm the world.

There are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism…

All extremists derive from one pool. This extreme mind-set is nurtured by religious rhetoric that needs to be reformed.

Where we get into problems, typically, is when our personal religious faith, or the community of faith that we participate in, tips into a sort of fundamentalist extremism, in which it's not enough for us to believe what we believe, but we start feeling obligated to, you know, hit you over the head because you don't believe the same thing. Or to treat you as somebody who's less than I am.

[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.

What the fundamentalists are doing is a total negation of their own faith - encouraging and lionizing suicide bombers and killing women and children, hardly in keeping with the teachings of Prophet Mohammed.

Religious faith, is a state of mind, that leads people to believe in something, it doesn't matter what, without a whisper of doubt, or a whiff of evidence, and believe so strongly in some cases, that they are prepare to kill and die for it, without the need for further justification.

One of the main causes of trouble in the world is dogmatic and fanatical belief in some doctrine for which there is no adequate evidence

People who believe they are acting with the mandate of God, who see others who don't share their beliefs as inferior in the eyes of God, make dangerous leaders. Just ask Osama Bin Laden.

It's my duty to fight those who have chosen to belong to the party of death, those who say they receive their orders from God somewhere and believe they have a duty to set the world on fire to achieve their own salvation.

Fanaticism in religion is the alliance of the passions she condemns with the dogmas she professes.

(The United States) is the same as al-Qaeda, under a different color flag, calling on the name a different God to sanction and approve our murder and our mayhem!

Fanatical religion driven to a certain point is almost as bad as none at all, but not quite.

Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. Mindless may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion.

Preying on the grievances of disaffected young men is the bedrock of Islamism.

I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder.

A real totalitarianism is at work in the world and wants to impose its views not only on Arab Muslims, but on the West. The same way that they veil women, Islamic radicals want to veil cartoons in the press.

Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.