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Reactionary: A man walking backwards with his face to the future.
-Aneurin Bevan
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There is no place in a fanatic's head where reason can enter.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
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Just as every conviction begins as a whim so does every emancipator serve his apprenticeship as a crank. A fanatic is a great leader who is just entering the room.
-Heywood Broun
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No violent extreme endures.
-Thomas Carlyle
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A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
-Sir Winston Churchill
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The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
-E. M. Cioran
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Like other revolutionaries I can thank God for the reactionaries. They clarify the issue.
-Robin G. Collingwood
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Fanaticism soberly defined, is the false fire of an over heated mind.
-William Cowper
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This woman did not fly to extremes; she lived there.
-Quentin Crisp
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Radical simply means grasping things at the root.
-Angela Y. Davis
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The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.
-Denis Diderot
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Railing and praising were his usual themes; and both showed his judgment in extremes. Either over violent or over civil, so everyone to him was either god or devil.
-John Dryden
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So over violent, or over civil that every man with him was God or Devil.
-John Dryden
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A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case.
-Finley Peter Dunne
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The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.
-Frantz Fanon
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I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.
-Robert Frost
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The force of what was called Panther rhetoric or word mongering resided not in elegant discourse but in strength of affirmation (or denial), in anger of tone and timbre. When the anger led to action there was no turgidity or over-emphasis. Anyone who has witnessed political rows among the Whites will have to admit that the Whites aren't overburdened with poetic imagination.
-Jean Genet
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Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.
-Edward Gibbon
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To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a sad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.
-Emma Goldman
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Nothing fools people as much as extreme passion.
-Bishop Hall
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All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.
-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951
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Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
-Aldous Huxley
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A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
-Aldous Huxley
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Mere human beings can't afford to be fanatical about anything. Not even about justice or loyalty. The fanatic for justice ends by murdering a million helpless people to clear a space for his law-courts. If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.
-Storm Jameson
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In the fevered state of our country, no good can ever result from any attempt to set one of these fiery zealots to rights, either in fact or principle. They are determined as to the facts they will believe, and the opinions on which they will act. Get by them, therefore, as you would by an angry bull; it is not for a man of sense to dispute the road with such an animal.
-Thomas Jefferson
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The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
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In the history of mankind, fanaticism has caused more harm than vice.
-Louis Kronenberger
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If you see one cold and vehement at the same time, set him down for a fanatic.
-Johann Kaspar Lavater
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Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.
-Reinhold Niebuhr
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Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
-George Orwell
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The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.
-Alexander Pope
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It is the nature of men having escaped one extreme, which by force they were constrained long to endure, to run headlong into the other extreme, forgetting that virtue doth always consist in the mean.
-Sir Walter Raleigh
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A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
-Salman Rushdie
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Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
-George Santayana
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Wisdom becomes nonsense in the mouth of a fanatic.
-Otto Schuwdrmer
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Those old faces, in Pasadena, California, and Tucson, Arizona, and Dallas, crumpling in hatred and fear at the mention of the United Nations or those liberals in government who constitute for them the fifth column of communism, yearn for an America that is as far from the society of the present as is the extended family system in village India.
-Ronald Segal
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My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.
-Source Unknown
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The man visited by ecstasies and visions, who takes dreams for realities is an enthusiast; the man who supports his madness with murder is a fanatic.
-Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Fanaticism, 1764
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I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.
-William Butler Yeats
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All the reputedly powerful reactionaries are merely paper tigers. The reason is that they are divorced from the people. Look! Was not Hitler a paper tiger? Was Hitler not overthrown? U.S. imperialism has not yet been overthrown and it has the atomic bomb. I believe it also will be overthrown. It, too, is a paper tiger.
-Mao Zedong
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Books about Fanaticism
