Clive Barker Quotes

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.

A man who thinks he has a higher purpose can do terrible things, even to those he professes to love.

Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy.

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.

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

They are not reformers who simply abhor evil. Such men become in the end abhorrent themselves.

To what great evils has religion been able to impel men.

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

The religion of Hell is patriotism.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

'Savior Of Nothing' calls out the would-be social justice warriors of the world who become so enveloped in fighting so passionately that they become exactly what they're trying to correct. They preach acceptance so much they become unaccepting.

I do not see why I should be polite to tyrants, who slobber of humanitarianism and think only of their own petty interests.

I think the worst thing we can do is to concede to fanaticism its devotion, say. Well, you have to understand, these people are really fanatics, so we should back down from them. I think if journalists start doing that then they won't be practicing journalism. If satirists start doing that then they won't be practicing satire.

Reformers who are obsessed with purity and cannot see that their obsession is impure.

I consider myself to be a man of principle. But, what man does not? Even the cutthroat, I have noticed, considers his actions "moral" after a fashion. Perhaps another person, reading of my life, would name me a religious tyrant. He could call me arrogant. What is to make that man's opinion any less valid than my own? I guess it all comes down to one fact: In the end, I'm the one with the armies.

That's always the way with fanatics; they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple.

Persecuting bigots may be compared to those burning lenses which Lenhenboeck and others composed from ice; by their chilling apathy they freeze the suppliant; by their fiery zeal they burn the sufferer.

Many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism, and sincerely hate all manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.

Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver.

I know one or two things about fanaticism and death, and I reject them.

There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes opposition a torment.

To what excesses do men rush for the sake of religion, of whose truth they are so little persuaded, and to whose precepts they pay so little regard!

The greatest horrors of our world are committed by people who are totally sincere.

Cynicism has its own zealots.

Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.' I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good.'