Fundamentalism Quotes

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott

“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.”
― Eugene Victor Debs

“People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”
― Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Anyone who thinks one book has all the answers hasn't read enough books.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Volume 6

“The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, 'All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.”
― Frank Zappa

“The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list -- yes, even the short skirts and the dancing -- are worth dying for?

The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.

How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.”
― Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

“There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question - Why We Suffer

“Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.”
― Noam Chomsky

“People wrap themselves in their beliefs. And they do it in such a way that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will set them free.”
― Michael Specter

“So this is where all the vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The 'vacuum' will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now. One thinks of the painstaking, cloud-dispelling labor of British scientists from Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Charles Darwin to Ernest Rutherford to Alan Turing and Francis Crick, much of it built upon the shoulders of Galileo and Copernicus, only to see it casually slandered by a moral and intellectual weakling from the usurping House of Hanover. An awful embarrassment awaits the British if they do not declare for a republic based on verifiable laws and principles, both political and scientific.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The Right thinks that the breakdown of the family is the source of crime and poverty, and this they very insightfully blame on the homosexuals, which would be amusing were it not so tragic. Families and 'family values' are crushed by grinding poverty, which also makes violent crime and drugs attractive alternatives to desperate young men and sends young women into prostitution. Family values are no less corrupted by the corrosive effects of individualism, consumerism, and the accumulation of wealth. Instead of shouting this from the mountain tops, the get-me-to-heaven-and-the-rest-be-damned Christianity the Christian Right preaches is itself a version of selfish spiritual capitalism aimed at netting major and eternal dividends, and it fits hand in glove with American materialism and greed.”
― John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church

“Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men accept the idea without a second thought.”
― C.J. Sansom, Revelation

“If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction.”
― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

“Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse."

(History Will Teach Us Nothing)”
― Sting, Nothing Like the Sun

“My friend Adele describes fundamentalism as holding so tightly to your beliefs that your fingernails leave imprints on the palm of your hand... I think she's right. I was a fundamentalist not because of the beliefs I held but because of how I held them: with a death grip. It would take God himself to finally pry them out of my hands. (p.17-18)”
― Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions

“I'm a fundamentalist in the true sense. That is to say, I follow the fundamentals of religion... But for over 1,400 years people have been interpreting and re-interpreting the religion to suit their own purpose! ... These [extremist and terrorist acts] are not Islamic fundamentals any more than the Christians who burned people at the stake are fundamentalist. They are actually deviating from the teachings of the religion!”
― Mahathir Mohamad

“We are living in modern times throughout the world and yet are dominated by medieval minds.”
― Eqbal Ahmad, Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire

“Fundamentalism manifests itself in different shapes and colors. 'The Absolute Truth' and 'the Only Way' beliefs, which have always caused hatred, bloodshed and divided our world, are among them.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Extremism manifests itself in different shapes and colors. 'The Absolute Truth' and 'the Only Way' beliefs are among them.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“But we should not cling! A plague upon fundamentalists and literalists! I am reminded of a story of Lord Krishna when he was a cowherd. Every night he invites the milkmaids to dance with him in the forest. They come and they dance. The night is dark, the fire in their midst roars and crackles, the beat of the music gets ever faster - the girls dance and dance and dance with their sweet lord, who has made himself so abundant as to be in the arms of each and every girl. But the moment the girls become possessive, the moment each one imagines that Krishna is her partner alone, he vanishes. So it is that we should not be jealous with God.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“মৌলবাদের প্রধান চরিত্র লক্ষণ হল যুক্তিহীন অন্ধবিশ্বাস। মৌলবাদ রোখার সবচাইতে বড় হাতিয়ার হল যুক্তিনিষ্ঠ চিন্তার চাষ করা। মানুষকে সংস্কৃতিবান এবং চিন্তাশীল করতে পারলেই মৌলবাদ বাধা দেয়ার সবচাইতে বড় কাজটি করা হয়।
আজকের দিনে দেশের যে সমস্ত কবি সাহিত্যিক দেশে-বিদেশে মৌলবাদের বিরুদ্ধে প্রচন্ড বক্তব্য রাখছেন, তাদের কথাবার্তার মধ্যে যুক্তিনিষ্ঠা এবং চিন্তাশীলতার অংশ কতটুকু? অজ্ঞ, নির্বোধ এবং নিরক্ষর মানুষের বিশ্বাসের ওপর আক্রমণ করে, তাঁকে চেতিয়ে তুলেই মৌলবাদের বিরুদ্ধে বড় জঙ্গাটা করা হয় বলে মনে করেন তাদেরকে আমি সুস্থ মানুষ বলে মনে করিনে। হয়ত তাঁরা কপট নয়ত মূর্খ।”
― Ahmed Sofa, নিকট ও দূরের প্রসঙ্গ

“I bet you've seen the fundamentalist bumper sticker that says, "God said it! I believe it! That settles it!" It must be a typo because what the driver really means is, "I said it! God believes it! That settles it!”
― Robert M. Price

“It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“Once dogmatism turns out the lights, you might as well close up shop as a civilization and pull up the covers as a sentient life form. You get nowhere with unquestioning certainty. It's thinking with your mind wide shut.”
― Bob Altemeyer

“The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“Larsson was an active and lifelong feminist, partly for personal reasons but also because he saw that ending gender slavery was as crucial to next-stage evolution as ending race slavery was to the last stage. It's a noble fight, not least because the various fundamentalisms threatening Western democracy are united in their urgent need to re-cage women's sexuality.”
― Elizabeth Farrelly

“A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.”
― Robin Wasserman, The Book of Blood and Shadow

“Misstraue jedem Politiker, jedem Regierungs- oder Staatschef, der seine Religion zum Instrument macht. Halte Abstand von solchen Politikern, die ihre auf das Jenseits orientierte Religion und ihre diesseitige Politik miteinander vermischen.”
― Helmut Schmidt, Sechs Reden