Harmful Ideology Quotes

In a global world, nationalism is a fantasy, and it's poison. It used to be appropriate, but it's not anymore, and we haven't learned that lesson yet.

The most rabidly religious people are the most rabidly evil.

I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous. . . . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.

It would, therefore, seem obvious that patriotism as a feeling is bad and harmful, and as a doctrine is stupid. For it is clear that if each people and each State considers itself the best of peoples and States, they all live in a gross and harmful delusion.

I have always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose.

Religion is unusual among divisive labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might have to respect them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

To terrify children with the image of hell... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?

In our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling - should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men.

What happens when we put belief in front of reason? When we even put belief above human life?

The belief that society benefits from destruction is lunacy.

Ill-digested principles are, if anything, worse than ill-digested food, for the latter harms the body and there is cure for it, whereas the former ruins the soul and there is no cure for it.

The idea of some people being less than people is poison to any society and needs to be named as such in order to halt its spread before it turns the soul of a society septic.

There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death?