This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"There is no more dangerous illusion than the fancies by which people try to avoid illusion. It is imagination which leads us astray; and the certainty which we seek through imagination, feeling, and taste, is one of the most dangerous sources from which fanaticism springs." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
"In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil." - Anna Jameson
"Fanaticism in religion is the alliance of the passions she condemns with the dogmas she professes." - Lord Acton, John Emerich Dalberg-Acton
"The blind fanaticism of one foolish honest man may cause more evil than the united efforts of twenty rogues." - Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm
"Fanaticism and intolerance often result from the delusion that, "this alone is the truth and everything else is false," causing people to commit atrocities in the name of "truth."" - P. D. Premasiri, fully Pahalawattage Don Premasiri
"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim." - George Santayana
"Fanaticism is idolatry; and it has the moral evil of idolatry in it; that is, a fanatic worships something which is the creation of his own desire, and thus even his self-devotion in support of it is only an apparent or his mind, which he least values, offer sacrifice to that which he most values." - Thomas Arnold
"Painful and corporeal punishments should never be applied to fanaticism; for, being founded on pride, it glories in persecution." - Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria-Bonesana
"Superstition changes a man to a beast, fanaticism makes him a wild beast, and despotism a beast of burden." - Jean-François de La Harpe
"In the history of mankind, fanaticism has caused more harm than vice." - Louis Kronenberger
"The ecumenical movement... is able to heal divisions which have become historically obsolete, to replace confessional fanaticism by inter-confessional cooperation, to conquer denominational provincialism, and to produce a new vision of the unity of all churches in their foundation." - Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich
"This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one." - Richard Dawkins
"I abhor unjust war. I abhor injustice and bullying by the strong at the expense of the weak, whether among nations or individuals. I abhor violence and bloodshed. I believe that war should never be resorted to when, or so long as, it is honorably possible to avoid it. I respect all men and women who from high motives and with sanity and self-respect do all they can to avert war. I advocate preparation for war in order to avert war; and I should never advocate war unless it were the only alternative to dishonor." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"This is a choice that makes overwhelming sense." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann
"Our character is what God and cats know of us." - Thomas Paine
"Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication-- after that it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to ME, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him." - Thomas Paine
"A quality of the person and not the system. It is an orientation of the personality to oneself, to one’s neighbor, to the universe; a total response; a way of seeing whatever one sees and of handling whatever one handles; a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of, a transcendent dimension." - Wilfred Cantwell Smith
"What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action." - Wendell Phillips
"It is, indeed, marvelous that science should ever have revived amid the fearful obstacles theologians cast in her way. Together with a system of biblical interpretation so stringent, and at the same time so capricious, that it infallibly came into collision with every discovery that was not in accordance with the unaided judgments of the senses, and therefore with the familiar expressions of the Jewish writers, everything was done to cultivate a habit of thought the direct opposite of the habits of science. The constant exaltation of blind faith, the countless miracles, the childish legends, all produced a condition of besotted ignorance, of groveling and trembling credulity, that can scarcely be paralleled except among the most degraded barbarians. Innovation of every kind was regarded as a crime; superior knowledge excited only terror and suspicion. If it was shown in speculation, it was called heresy. If it was shown in the study of nature, it was called magic. The dignity of the Popedom was unable to save Gerbert from the reputation of a magician, and the magnificent labors of Roger Bacon were repaid by fourteen years of imprisonment, and many others of less severe but unremitting persecution. Added to all this, the overwhelming importance attached to theology diverted to it all those intellects which in another condition of society would have been employed in the investigations of science. When Lord Bacon was drawing his great chart of the field of knowledge, his attention was forcibly drawn to the torpor of the middle ages. That the mind of man should so long have remained tranced and numbed, seemed, at first sight, an objection to his theories, a contradiction to his high estimate of human faculties. But his answer was prompt and decisive. A theological system had lain like an incubus upon Christendom, and to its influence, more than to any other single cause, the universal paralysis is to be ascribed." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"All people are equal, it is not birth, it is virtue alone that makes the difference." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"While loving glory so much how can you persist in a plan which will cause you to lose it?" - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Everybody knows that fanaticism is religion caricatured; bears, indeed, about the same relation to it that a monkey bears to a man; yet, with many, contempt of fanaticism is received as a sure sign of hostility to religion." - Edwin Percy Whipple
"The road to truth is the effort of the heart, not the mind." - Elif Safak
"Can we establish an ideology, or whatever you like to call it, which insists that the educated have taken upon themselves an obligation and have not simply acquired a "passport to privilege"? Â…It is, you might well say, an elementary matter of justice." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher