All Quotes By Tag: Zealotry

“During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other’s candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town’s few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?’ It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.”

“That’s what you get,’ he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, ‘when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give ’em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains.”

“Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.”

“Anyone who says he knows God’s intention is showing a lot of very human ego.”

“Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.”

“Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.”

“It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.”

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”

“A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.”