Quotes about Extremism

When you fuse the two ideas of "nation" and "socialism," what you get is National Socialism.

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by a group of former Confederate soldiers; its first grand wizard was a Confederate general who was also a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. The Klan soon spread beyond the South to the Midwest and the West and became, in the words of historian Eric Foner, "the domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.

Hitler was a vegetarian. Just goes to show, vegetarianism, not always a good thing. Can in some extreme cases lead to genocide.

Only fanatics — in religion as well as in politics — can find a meaning in someone else's death.

Islamic fundamentalism in its activist manifestation is bad news. Religious fundamentalism in general is bad news. We know about religious fundamentalism in South Africa. Calvinist fundamentalism has been an unmitigated force of benightedness in our history.

the passionate defense of the Bible as a "history book" among the more conservative wings of Christianity, despite intentions, isn't really an act of submission to God; it is making God submit to us. In its most extreme forms, making God look like us is what the Bible calls idolatry.

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.

I am looking for suggestions on what we can do about extremists within our own society. They cannot be ignored.

Kill them all in the Name of the Lord.

Earnestness is good; it means business. But fanaticism overdoes, and is consequently reactionary.

every uncompromising ideology reduces faith to an idolatry

The first word Palestinian schoolchildren learn in their reading primers is jihad.