C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Fanaticism
Fanaticism is governed by imagination rather than judgment.
The child of false zeal.
The false fire of an overheated mind.
Reason is not compatible with zeal run mad.
A fanatic, either religious or political, is the subject of strong delusions.
The downright fanatic is nearer to the heart of things than the cool and slippery disputant.
If you see one cold and vehement at the same time, set him down for a fanatic.
That can never be reasoned down which was not reasoned up.
Fanaticism is the child of false zeal and of superstition, the father of intolerance and of persecution.
Fanaticism is such an overwhelming impression of the ideas relating to the future world as disqualifies for the duties of life.
The blind fanaticism of one foolish honest man may cause more evil than the united efforts of twenty rogues.
What is fanaticism to-day is the fashionable creed to-morrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.
An uncontrolled imagination may become as surely intoxicated by overindulgence as a toper may do bodily with strong drink.
Fanaticism, to which men are so much inclined, has always served not only to render them more brutalized but more wicked.
Though fanaticism drinks at many founts, its predisposing caused is mostly the subject of an invisible futurity.
There is such a delusion as evinces itself in cool vehemence; and it is the most dangerous of all expressions of fanaticism.
Earnestness is good; it means business. But fanaticism overdoes, and is consequently reactionary.
E. P. Whipple calls fanaticism “religion caricatured,” which is a full definition in a word.
There is no doubt that religious fanatics have done more to prejudice the cause they affect to advocate than have its opponents.
Painful and corporeal punishments should never be applied to fanaticism; for, being founded on pride, it glories in persecution.
Fanaticism is a fire, which heats the mind indeed, but heats without purifying. It stimulates and ferments all the passions; but it rectifies none of them.
To conquer fanaticism, you must tolerate it; the shuttlecock of religious difference soon falls to the ground when there are no battledoors to beat it backward and forward.
Of all things, wisdom is the most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because, of all enemies, it is that against which she is the least able to furnish any kind of resource.
Fanaticism, or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only powerful and active so long as it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and it becomes conservatism, whether it will or no.
Fanaticism is an inflamed state of the passions; and nothing that is violent will last long. The vicissitudes of the world and the business of life are admirably adapted to abate the excesses of religious enthusiasm.
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.
There is no cruelty so inexorable and unrelenting as that which proceeds from a bigoted and presumptuous supposition of doing service to God. The victim of the fanatical persecutor will find that the stronger the motives he can urge for mercy are, the weaker will be his chance for obtaining it, for the merit of his destruction will be supposed to rise in value in proportion as it is effected at the expense of every feeling both of justice and of humanity.