Will Rogers Quotes

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.

I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder.

The most rabidly religious people are the most rabidly evil.

The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.

The world is now aware that the most unavoidable and most dangerous weapon that exists is the blind decisiveness of a man ready to sacrifice his life for an obscure cause.

Men whose religion was excessively zealous split themselves into opposing factions, and once divided by a single mistake they disagreed on everything and came to be entirely at odds with one another.

All extremists derive from one pool. This extreme mind-set is nurtured by religious rhetoric that needs to be reformed.

In every religion, you find the same extremists.

What the fundamentalists are doing is a total negation of their own faith - encouraging and lionizing suicide bombers and killing women and children, hardly in keeping with the teachings of Prophet Mohammed.

Religion makes them crazy. Not a woman I ever met wasn't crazy with religion.

Fanaticism in religion is the alliance of the passions she condemns with the dogmas she professes.

This sort of behavior is left to the psychotic, dogmatic, fundamentalist believers you see on your TV everyday letting off bombs and killing people in the name of God. Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing.

Preying on the grievances of disaffected young men is the bedrock of Islamism.

I don't think the 9/11 attacks taught us anything we didn't already know about religion. It has long been obvious - even to the deeply religious - that religious fanaticism is an extremely dangerous deranger of otherwise sane and goodhearted people.

A real totalitarianism is at work in the world and wants to impose its views not only on Arab Muslims, but on the West. The same way that they veil women, Islamic radicals want to veil cartoons in the press.

I don't think people by nature are extremists. You will never find a population of extremists. Extremists have existed throughout the centuries on all religions. And what happens is, extremists start to have more leverage when the situation is bad.

I was a Muslim once, remember, and it was when I was most devout that I was most full of hate.

There are fundamentalist psychopaths in every religion in the world. Every single one.

The terrorists hide behind Allah.

The Muslim world is threatened by religious fanaticism. The Western world is threatened by secular fanaticism.

You're always going to have extremists in every religion.

I had been fascinated with Islam since college - particularly how it could inspire such fervor in our modern age and move a significant number of its followers to horrific acts of violence. That invisible hand moved me to study more and more about Islam.

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

Moderation is part of faith, so those who accuse Muslim schools of fostering fanaticism should learn a bit more about Islam.

Cults, or related social movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, result in massive military expenses.