Zealot Quotes & Sayings

Cynicism has its own zealots. — Mason Cooley

In any case, the Christian world is not one, neither is the Islamic, nor does their combined authority speak to or for the entire world, but the world of the fanatic IS one and it cuts across all religions, ideologies and vocations. The tributaries that feed the cesspool of fanaticism may ooze from sources separated by history, clime and race, by injustices and numerous privations, but they arrive at the same destination - the zone of unquestioning certitude - sped by a common impetus that licences each to proclaim itself the pure and unsullied among the polluted. The zealot is one that creates a Supreme Being, or Supreme Purpose, in his or her own image, then carries out the orders of that solipsistic device that commands from within, in lofty alienation from, and utter contempt of, society and community. — Wole Soyinka

There are different kinds of terrorist movements, and specifically you occasionally face a bully, a Qaddafi. But a bully is different from a zealot. A bully you can deal with, with force, and persuade that bully, through force alone, to stop what he was doing. — Robert McFarlane

If there's one thing worse than a zealot, it's a hypocrite!
Merlin, from the X-Calibur sequel — R. Jackson-Lawrence

Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. — Joseph Campbell

If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you learn to recognize and avoid the symptoms of the zealot and the person who knows he is right. For the dissenter, the skeptical mentality is at least as important as any armor of principle. — Christopher Hitchens

FRACTURED FACTIONS
Many cults are created by the uncontrollable egos of religious zealots — Kamil Ali

The force that played havoc with the cortisol in my blood was the same force that helped my body recover; if I felt better one day and worse the next, it was unchanged. It chose no side. It gave the girl next to me in the hospital pneumonia; it also gave her white blood cells that would resist the infection. And the atoms in those cells, and the nuclei in those atoms, the same bits of carbon that were being spun into new planets in some corner of space without a name. My insignificance had become unspeakably beautiful to me. That unified force was a god too massive, too inhuman, to resist with the atheism in which I had been brought up. I became a zealot without a religion. — G. Willow Wilson

To be honest, one can only feel glad that so many modern iconoclasts consider Christianity to be full of exceptionally hypocritical, religious zealots - it's biblically accurate and a prophecy fulfilled. The old smoke screen is one of Satan's favorite tricks. He conceals the authentic. He has a persistent strategy of targeting those who remind him of Christianity because he fears those who remind him of Christ. — Criss Jami

I would rather have strong enemies than a world of passive individualists. In a world of passive individualists nothing seems worth anything simply because nobody stands for anything. That world has no convictions, no victories, no unions, no heroism, no absolutes, no heartbeat. That world has rigor mortis. — Criss Jami

It is a zealot's faith that blasts the shrines of the false god, but builds no temple to the true. — Sydney Thompson Dobell

I view music as entertainment. When I'm on stage, I don't look at that as a platform for sharing ideology. Otherwise I'd be a zealot myself. That's why, when people ask me, 'Do you think you can change the world through your music?' I say, 'I doubt it.' — Greg Graffin

Morphine is like a religious zealot on a mission; it searches for body parts to convert, offering milk-and-honeyed dreams to flow sluggishly through your veins. — Andrew Davidson

To a zealot every one of his own sect is a saint, while the most upright of a different sect are to him children of perdition. — Henry Home, Lord Kames

Stay," she panted. Tears leaked from her eyes. "Stay till the end."
"And after," he said. "And always."
"I want to feel safe again. I want to go home to Ravka."
"Then I'll take you there. We'll set fire to raisins or whatever you heathens do for fun."
"Zealot," she said weakly.
"Witch."
"Barbarian."
"Nina," he whispered, "little red bird. Don't go. — Leigh Bardugo

We always think we are right, and - search as I have - there is no evil under the sun that somebody somewhere won't argue is actually a good, no idiocy that hasn't got its perfectly serious defenders, and no tyrant, past or present - no matter how bloody - without some bunch of zealot schmucks to defend him or his reputation till the last breath in their bodies - or preferably somebody else's. — Clive Barker

Here's our problem today. Not only do we not like ultimatums, but we have too many Christians who have accepted Jesus into their hearts and who have been baptized and who have confessed their sins and who have joined the Church and who are in Bible studies and who are absolutely 100 percent convinced they are going to heaven, but who are not followers of Jesus. There are many who haven't made it real. The mark of a follower of Jesus is following. The mark of a follower of Jesus is that she or he has given Jesus her or his heart. It's that simple. It's that demanding. It's that serious. Jesus was a moral zealot and he expected his followers to become moral zealots too. He wanted them to live the Committed. Life. — Scot McKnight

There is a difference between criticizing people and criticizing a people's uninformed ideals. That is, unless one defines himself or others by their ideals, then he is offended, and usually offended secretly. Because oddly enough, this person is the same person quickest to resort to dismissive name-calling, such as 'bigot' or 'zealot'. And oddly enough, he is always the one, the 'open-minded' one, who adamantly protests for, not only himself, but others not to listen to any type of scholarly theological truth inherently for the sake of his own personal, moral beliefs. — Criss Jami

So this Zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob, and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath. So he pulls an alternating-current taser on me and tells me that only the Official Serbian Church of Tesla can save my polyphase intrinsic electric field, known to non-engineers as "the soul." So I hit him. What would you do? — Warren Ellis

Be kind to her when she comes back. Her love is not only for children but for humanity. She will be a good-hearted and magnificent zealot one day. As her mother is now.
Goodbye, Kate. And below he had signed as he rarely did, with his Christian name. — Dorothy Dunnett

I was probably toward 8 1/2 when I actually joined the church and was baptized - and, my God, did I take it seriously! I was a zealot who irritated every one of my third-grade friends. They didn't beat me up, but I got labeled "the preacher girl." — Oprah Winfrey

Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools. — David Addington

So then, give back to Caesar what is his, and give back to God what belongs to God. That is the zealot argument in its simplest, most concise form. And it seems to be enough for the authorities in Jerusalem to immediately label Jesus as lestes. A bandit. A zealot. — Reza Aslan

That man is thought a dangerous knave, Or zealot plotting crime, Who for advancement of his kind Is wiser than his time. — Douglas William Jerrold

Priests are always easy to blame. They make convenient scapegoats - after all, anyone with a strong faith different from your own must either be a crazy zealot or a lying manipulator. — Brandon Sanderson

Jack had seen Denker the teacher as not much different from the strutting South American little Caesars in their banana kingdoms, standing dissidents up against the wall of the handiest squash or handball court, a super-zealot in a comparatively small puddle, a man whose every whim becomes a crusade. — Stephen King

Throughout history, more has been lost to over-eager zealots than to mediocre slackers. A slacker leaves well enough alone. A zealot, a true patriot or company man, will keep pushing and pushing and pushing until the situation is screwed up beyond all recognition. If not properly motivated and constrained, a zealot is the most destructive force of all. — Patrick E. McLean

When I go to Iran, I see ... that there are all different shades and colors in Iran, from atheist to religious zealot. So Iran is no different than any other country. I mean, they are connected with the rest of the world. — Mohamed ElBaradei

His razor flashed once, briefly, and the zealot cried out in agony as he was instantly and expertly circumsized.
"You can go now," said Razor Eddie, and the zealot ran, howling all the way down the Street. And everyone who'd been watching went about their business again.
"Well," I said, trying to keep it light. "At least he's not a complete prick anymore. — Simon R. Green

To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster! — Denis Diderot

Well, who is more likely to volunteer to take a job in a bureaucracy that has little to recommend it except that it gives you the power to use government force to control the lives of others? A dispassionate scientist or a zealot? In government, the zealots eventually take over. — John Stossel

I was a reluctant convert, and I am by no means a zealot. But the evidence is compelling: to write off wind-power is either ill-informed or dishonest. — Jonathan Dimbleby

Most guys will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you're a real person, and some will just ignore you.
The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic. — Chuck Palahniuk

I was always a doubter when it came to religion. How irrational of me, then, to love a zealot. But then, both love and zealotry are irrational states of mind. — Octavia E. Butler

Being myself a warm zealot for the attainment & enjoiment by all mankind of as much liberty as each may exercise without injury to the equal liberty of his fellow citizens, I have lamented that in France the endeavors to obtain this should have been attended with the effusion of so much blood. — Thomas Jefferson

The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical Jesus should hopefully reveal is that Jesus of Nazareth - Jesus the man - is every bit as compelling, charismatic, and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ. He is, in short, someone worth believing in. — Reza Aslan

If we read the text alone, assuming that the word 'cross' can only derive its meaning from the later death of Jesus, then its appearance in the text must be an anachronism read back into the story after the crucifixion. This conclusion becomes unnecessary if the cross, being the standard punishment for insurrection or for the refusal to confess Caesar's lordship, already had a clear definition in the listener's awareness. 'Take up your cross' may even have been a standard phrase of Zealot recruiting. The disciple's cross is not a metaphor for self-mortification or even generally innocent suffering; 'if you follow me, your fate will be like mine, the fate of a revolutionary. You cannot follow me without facing that fate. — John Howard Yoder

To disarm a zealot, teach him truth by precept, and mildness by example. — Al-Kindi

Martin Silenus made an expansive gesture. "I was baptized a Lutheran," he said. "A subset which no longer exists. I helped create Zen Gnosticism before any of your parents were born. I have been a Catholic, a revelationist, a neo-Marxist, an interface zealot, a Bound Shaker, a satanist, a bishop in the Church of Jake's Nada, and a dues-paying subscriber to the Assured Reincarnation Institute. Now, I am happy to say, I am a simple pagan." He smiled at everyone. "To a pagan," he concluded, "the Shrike is a most acceptable deity. — Dan Simmons

In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,
But all the sadder tums, the more he knows! — H.P. Lovecraft

Typical sentient's psyche is a spiderweb. Pull on the right thread and you will get the desired result. Praise them and they will like you. Ridicule them and they'll hate you. Greedy can be bought, timid can be frightened, smart can be persuaded, but the zealots are immune to money, fear, or reason. A zealot's psyche is a tightrope. They have severed everything else in favor of their goal. They will pay any price for their victory, and that makes them infinitely more dangerous. — Ilona Andrews

Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy - not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits - despotic in his ordinary demeanour - known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty - when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity - to join in the cry of danger to liberty - to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion - to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day - It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may "ride the storm and direct the whirlwind. — Alexander Hamilton

Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot. — E.A. Bucchianeri

I wouldn't consider myself a Buddhist or a card-carrying zealot at all. My first commitment is as a scientist to uncover the truth about all this. — Richard Davidson

No, no. You shall make no such confession, Stephen. I am sure that if he is still alive now, if Father Joseph rejoices, he is also full of terror. He is a man, Stephen, just as you are. Listen, he told me some years ago that he reads St. John's account of Gethsemane every day. It reminds him that our Lord himself desired not to suffer, not even for his Father's will. Never deny your own humanity, lest you deny the same humanity of our Lord." He saw that Stephen struggled with this admonition. "Hold your fear close to your heart, even cherish it, for that is where you share our Savior's Cross - not in his divinity, but in his humanity, in his Gethsemane." He was relieved to learn that the young man was no zealot, that he had the good sense to be frightened - it would make him cautious. — Dena Hunt

The golden age is before us, not behind us. — Simon The Zealot

A child who had been introduced to misery in Saudi Arabia, a teenager who went to wage jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a deeply devout Muslim who had graduated with honors in medicine, a man who had fed a stranger to wild dogs in Damascus, a zealot who had dosed three foreigners with smallpox and watched them die in agony, gave thanks to Allah for the blessings that had been bestowed upon him. — Terry Hayes

The task of defining Jesus's message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion of the new faith. As these extraordinary men and women, many of them immersed in Greek philosophy and Hellenistic thought, began to reinterpret Jesus's message so as to make it more palatable both to their fellow Greek-speaking Jews and to their gentile neighbors in the Diaspora, they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter. — Reza Aslan

If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped. — Paul Johnson

The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end - wealth, fame, eternal salvation - but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. This is no less true for the religious fanatic than for the fanatical pianist or fanatical mountain climber. As a result of his (or — Jon Krakauer

The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit the earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen will perish. — Eric Hoffer

After Death nothing is, and nothing, death,
The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.
Let the ambitious zealot lay aside
His hopes of heaven, whose faith is but his pride;
Let slavish souls lay by their fear
Nor be concerned which way nor where
After this life they shall be hurled.
Dead, we become the lumber of the world,
And to that mass of matter shall be swept
Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.
Devouring time swallows us whole.
Impartial death confounds body and soul.
For Hell and the foul fiend that rules
God's everlasting fiery jails
(Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),
With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,
Are senseless stories, idle tales,
Dreams, whimseys, and no more. — John Wilmot

A State infinitely worse than that which the most inflamed Zealot, the most violent Republican or Enthusiast even pretended to dread before the Rebellion commenced. — Charles Inglis

He said, "So ... do you like music?"
It was a pretty stupid question. I mean, who doesn't like music? Okay, maybe some puritanical zealot out in Hicksville.
But really. It was kind of like asking, "Do you like food?" "Isn't oxygen great?" "Have you got skin? I do." I knew what he meant, though. — Kristin Walker

Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurious as to leave unexamined the influence and motives of a woman who once boasted of operating more than five hundred convents in upward of 105 countries - "without counting India"? Lone self-sacrificing zealot, or chair of a missionary multinational? The scale alters with the perspective, and the perspective alters with the scale. — Christopher Hitchens

Also, the world contains a lot of people. The statistics of power-law distributions and the events of the past two centuries agree in telling us that a small number of perpetrators can cause a great deal of damage. If somewhere among the world's six billion people there is a zealot who gets his hands on a stray nuclear bomb, he could single-handedly send the statistics through the roof. But even if he did, we would still need an explanation of why homicide rates fell a hundredfold, why slave markets and debtors' prisons have vanished, and why the Soviets and Americans did not go to war over Cuba, to say nothing of Canada and Spain over flatfish. — Steven Pinker

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. — Winston S. Churchill

Jesus's titulus reads KING OF THE JEWS. His crime: striving for kingly rule; sedition. And so, like every bandit and revolutionary, every rabble-rousing zealot and apocalyptic prophet who came before or after him - — Reza Aslan

Susan Orlean

I guess it's probably safer to be this way bout clothing than men or religion or something that could be really dangerous. I'm quite pragmatic about other choices in my life, but with clothing I'm a romantic - I abandon myself completely and the practical side get trumped. I become a zealot. — Emily Spivack

If your friend's friend's friend (whom you may not have even met) is obese, a smoker or a zealot of some kind then it is a lot more likely that you will be too. — James H. Fowler

The choice between James's vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul's vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one for the second and third generations of Jesus's followers to make.
Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul's creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. — Reza Aslan

A single zealot may commence prosecutor, and better men be his victims. — Thomas Jefferson