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 religion of Hell is patriotism.
This quotation is often incorrectly given as “Patriotism is the religion of Hell.”
I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, and the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough - I call it the one immortal blemish on the human race.
Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.
We have a toxic ideology, hopefully very small, within Islam; certainly most people, most Muslims, don't agree with this violent, jihadist approach.
What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" - that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization - everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.
It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they're used. The fact that they exist at all, their presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. Control our behavior. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks deep in the base of our brains. They are purveyors of madness. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.
Now and always, hard-line policy and those who embrace it are vessels for darker forces that are at once self-cannibalizing and combustible. No good can come of them. They are unsustainable because their sense of righteousness denies human worth.
It is thus religion infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity and fanaticism: if he has a heated imagination it drives him on to fury; if he has activity, it makes him a madman, who is frequently as cruel to himself, as he is dangerous and incommodious to others: if, on the contrary, he be phlegmatic or of a slothful habit, he becomes melancholy and is useless to society.
I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It's not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.
It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.
It was but then, when you're, one of the great poisonous events that have infected us all who were in South Africa is that the idea of difference is drip fed into your veins. It's that that you fight.
Kids are told there are no differences between boys and girls. They are told there is no such thing ultimately as right and wrong. Values are relative. Truth is relative. Morality is defined by individual choice. If that isn't a recipe for sexual harassment and other forms of sexual and physical abuse, I don't know what it is.
The funny thing is all these school shootings that we have, always happen in very religious communities. Maybe it's because the centre of their lives is a big fat nothing and it's just a fantasy and there's nothing there. I think maybe that might have something to do with it.
Nationalism ... is like cheap alcohol. First it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, then it kills you.
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.
You have this mounting aggressive ignorance with the rabbit's foot of their particular religion. You don't really have any kind of spiritual law, just a kind of a rabid mental illness. The songs are a little slice of life.
It amazes me that some people who ordinarily can recognize autocratic bullying, tacky sloganeering, and - especially - camp value are unable to spot it in this Hate Scare that grips the Western world.