Fundamentalist Quotes

• Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

  James D. Watson

  Religious, Science, Theory Of Evolution

  James D. Watson (1970). “Molecular Biology of the Gene”

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• If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.

  Duff Goldman

  What If, Answers, Becoming

  "Duff Goldman: The Ace of Cakes On A Sugar High" by Regina Varolli, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 15, 2011.

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• Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Confidence, Reality, Usual

  "Redemption songs" by Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. May 28, 2004.

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• A fundamentalist can't bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality.

  Jimmy Carter

  People, Process, Implied

  "The US and Israel Stand Alone". Der Spiegel Interview, www.spiegel.de. August 15, 2006.

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• Fundamentalists who say they are not going to pay any attention to the charts are like a doctor who says he's not going to take a patient's temperature.

  Bruce Kovner

  Doctors, Physicians, Analysis

  "Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders". Book by Jack D. Schwager, 1989.

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• Where we get into problems, typically, is when our personal religious faith, or the community of faith that we participate in, tips into a sort of fundamentalist extremism, in which it's not enough for us to believe what we believe, but we start feeling obligated to, you know, hit you over the head because you don't believe the same thing. Or to treat you as somebody who's less than I am.

  Barack Obama

  Religious, Believe, Community

  Source: www.patheos.com

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• One way to identify the optimal human diet, pretty obvious to all but fundamentalist reductionists, is to survey and compare populations as they already exist, and see what they eat and how healthy they are.

  T. Colin Campbell

  Healthy, Population, Way

  T. Colin Campbell, Howard Jacobson (2013). “Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition”, p.61, BenBella Books, Inc.

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• I am now a fundamentalist American; give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez-faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit.

  Rose Wilder Lane

  Opportunity, Giving, Laissez Faire Capitalism

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• In their recently aborted struggle to inject Genesis literalism into science classrooms, fundamentalist groups followed their usual opportunistic strategy of arguing two contradictory sides of a question when a supposed rhetorical advantage could be extracted from each.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Struggle, Two, Usual

  Stephen Jay Gould (1991). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• In America, fundamentalist Christians believe the world was created 6,000 years ago - in England people drink in bars that are older than that.

  Steve Aylett

  Christian, Believe, Years

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• I do not believe a person can take two issues from Scripture, those being abortion and gay marriage, and adhere to them as sins, then neglect much of the rest and call himself a fundamentalist or even a conservative. The person who believes the sum of his morality involves gay marriage and abortion alone, and neglects health care and world trade and the environment and loving his neighbor and feeding the poor is, by definition, a theological liberal, because he takes what he wants from Scripture and ignores the rest.

  Donald Miller

  Believe, Gay, Two

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• My notion of spirituality was different than it is now, but even if I'd been the most fundamentalist of believers, I would have assumed that God had better things to do than arbitrarily smite me with shaking palsy.

  Michael J. Fox

  Different, Spirituality, Notion

  Michael J. Fox (2011). “Lucky Man: A Memoir”, p.179, Random House

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• The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have my demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share the same crusading zeal and the same lack of humor, charity and common human decency. These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Christian, Liars, Should Have

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• The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Beautiful, Ruins, Building

  Mohsin Hamid (2007). “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, p.144, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.

  Robin Wasserman

  Believe, Thinking, Max

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• People on death row, the treatment of animals, women's right to choose. So much in America is based on religious fundamentalist Christianity. Grow up! This is the modern world!

  Eddie Vedder

  Religious, Growing Up, Animal

  "Pearl Jam: 'People get that this means something'" by Dave Simpson, www.theguardian.com. August 13, 2009.

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• Most of my fundamentalist brothers and sisters - and I am an evangelical, so I can say most of my fundamentalist brothers and sisters - are quite willing to pack women off and send them as missionaries to dangerous places where they might get killed.

  Tony Campolo

  Brother, Missionary, Might

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• It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.

  Barney Frank

  Party, Taken, Yale

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• What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Odd, Biology, Adaptation

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• I get along so much better with fundamentalist Christians than I do with wishy-washy liberals, who want everyone to get along.

  Penn Jillette

  Christian, Want

  "Love and memory and humanity: magician and novelist Penn Jillette on censorship, sock monkeys, and Bullshit!". Reason Magazine Interview, 2004.

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• There is a Western world. There is America. There is Great Britain and Germany and France and Russia and China and other nations. I doubt that there is one country amongst those I mentioned which has a desire to see Iran, with its fundamentalist, Islamic, extremist government, possessing nuclear weapons.

  Ehud Olmert

  Country, Islamic, Russia

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• Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

  Pat Robertson

  Husband, Children, Women

  "Robertson Letter Attacks Feminists". www.nytimes.com. 1992.

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• I'm parodied as being some right-wing fundamentalist extremist, it just isn't true. The parody doesn't reflect reality.

  Pat Robertson

  Reality, Wings, Parody

  "Pat Robertson: A Life, A Legacy, Part 1". Interview with Lee Webb, www.cbn.com.

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• If ever I expected to come face to face with an angry Christian fundamentalist, it wasn't in FAO Schwarz.

  J. K. Rowling

  Christian, Faces, Expected

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• Evolutionary biology is genuinely scientific, but more than that it opens the door to a world more marvellous than any Christian fundamentalist has ever read into the pages of the Bible.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Christian, Doors, World

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