Umberto Eco Quotes

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

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.

He who defends his money is a martyr, and who defends his religion is a martyr, and he who defends his honor is a martyr.

The youth movement here must aspire to a martyrdom death…. The young must be first at the front line - don’t hide at the back. You must be at the front, die as martyrs and all your sins will be forgiven. This is how to achieve forgiveness.

It is truer to say that martyrs create faith more than faith creates martyrs.

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.

We are not interested in our own personal security. On the contrary, each of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah. The most honorable death is to be killed.

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

The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others

The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong — for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Martyrdom is evidence only of a man's honesty - it is no evidence that he is not mistaken. Men have suffered martyrdom for all sorts of opinions in politics and in religion; yet they could not therefore have all been in the right; although they could give no stronger evidence that they believed themselves in the right.

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.

I think religion has caused so much catastrophe in the world.

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

We cannot judge Christianity by the Ku Klux Klan and we cannot judge Islam by the Taliban.

Sectarianism, bigotry, and it's horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful Earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization, and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.

Over the course of history many religions have fallen victim to violent interpretations.

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

The slayers of the heretics are the worst heretics of all.

Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute.

Religion can turn holy stories into flaming swords.

If my son were to oppose the Catholic Church, I myself would carry the faggots to burn him.

For months people have been begging me to come here for this Kamikaze operation. We will die well. The fact that we are taking a role in a great moment is history is a great honor.