Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Fanaticism   Listen
noun
Fanaticism  n.  Excessive enthusiasm, unreasoning zeal, or wild and extravagant notions, on any subject, especially religion, politics or ideology; religious frenzy.
Synonyms: See Superstition.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Fanaticism" Quotes from Famous Books



... trampled the poor budding heart, until she thought it good for nothing upon earth before she offered it to Heaven. I fear it was nothing higher than that strange revulsion of feeling, world-weariness, disappointment, disgust, remorse, fanaticism—either, any, or all of these, call it what you will, that in past ages and Catholic countries have filled monasteries with the whilom, gay, worldly and ambitious; that has sent many a woman in the prime ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... the absolute falsehood of the miracular testimony on which, in his opinion, 'our holy religion' rests, in order that the character of the superstructure being inferred from that of the foundation, both might be condemned together. There is, however, an irreligious as well as a religious fanaticism, and, though it is difficult, while looking at Hume's portrait, to credit the owner of that plump, good-humoured face with feeling of any sort warm enough to be termed fanatical, it is humiliating to note from his example into what ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... is difficult to determine what could be Lord George's motives for the conduct which led to these awful results, during the whole of which he preserved a composure that bordered on insensibility; he was a perfect master of himself whilst the city was in flames. Much may be laid to fanaticism, and the mental derangement which it either produced or evinced. When too late he tried in vain to abate the fury he had excited, and offered to take his stand by Lord Rodney's[55] side when the Bank was attacked, to aid that officer, who commanded the Guards, ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson

... in the public buildings, and especially in the chapel, that the greatness of Wykeham, as an architect, is best seen. In spite of the destructive fanaticism of the Reformation, and the almost equally destructive "restorations" of the notorious Wyatt, and of Sir Gilbert Scott (who inexcusably raised the height of the roof), the chapel still is indisputably the finest ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells

... choosing the classic model, did so only after long hesitation. "His favorite subject was Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. On this he had fixed for the greater part of his life. What led him to change his mind was partly, as I suppose, his growing fanaticism; partly his ambition to take a different route from Spenser; but chiefly, perhaps, the discredit into which the stories of chivalry had now fallen by the immortal satire of Cervantes. Yet we see through all his poetry, where his enthusiasm flames out most, a certain predilection for the legends ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... an earnest effort to procure his release, and the Grand Vizier promised that the young man should not be beheaded. On learning that he had been, the ambassador declared it to be an insult to the Established Religion of England, as well as to all Europe, and insisted that no similar act of fanaticism should ever again occur. In this he was said to be warmly seconded both by the French and Prussian ministers. The Grand Vizier, as before, was ready to give a verbal pledge; but soon a second act of treachery was discovered. A Greek, in the interior of Asia Minor, had declared himself ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson

... and light. He believed his church to be the best door to heaven, if indeed it was not in his estimation the only one. He was a fanatic, pure and simple, as regarded his own denomination, but a fanatic full of high and noble purposes, and one whose zeal was productive only of good. This fanaticism was necessary to the success of his labors. It was his perfect belief that his was the only church in which sinners could find perfect peace that carried him through the difficulties which encompassed him. Men were dying ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.

... Kansuh, where there had been many thousand followers of Islam since an early period of Chinese history. They were generally obedient subjects and sedulous cultivators of the soil; but they were always liable to sudden ebullitions of fanaticism or of turbulence, and it was said that during the later years of his reign Keen Lung had meditated a wholesale execution of the male population above the age of fifteen. The threat, if ever made, was never carried out, but the report suffices to show ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... Trincomalee. It began upon an utterly unfounded, ridiculous rumour; it terminated, if my memory serves me correctly, in something akin to the very thing it was supposed to avert. That is to say, during the outburst of fanaticism, that most sacred of all relics—the holy tooth of Buddha—disappeared mysteriously from the temple of Dambool, and in spite of the fact that many lacs of rupees were offered for its recovery, it has never, I believe, been found, or even traced, although a huge fortune awaits the restorer, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew

... a very lengthy account of the celebrated Papal decree which has made so many martyrs, depopulated our schools, introduced ignorance, fanaticism, and misrule, rewarded vice, thrown the whole community into the greatest confusion, caused disorder everywhere, and established the most arbitrary and the most barbarous inquisition; evils which have doubled within the last thirty years. I will content myself with a word or two, and will not ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... belonged to her aunt Mary—some venerable Lady's Magazines, that had once performed a sea-voyage with their owner, and undergone a storm, and whose pages were stained with salt water; some mad Methodist Magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism; the equally mad letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the Living; a few old English classics. From these faded flowers Caroline had in her childhood extracted the honey; they were tasteless to her now. By way of change, and also of doing good, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... passed from the terrible chamber with its fearful evidences of the dreadful lengths to which misguided fanaticism will occasionally carry men, even in the cause of religion, and proceeded to busy himself in making all the arrangements necessary for the comfortable conveyance of the three unfortunate victims of Inquisitional ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood

... a mistake, let us remember, to regard the anti-abolitionist temper at the North wholly as apathy, friendliness to slavery, or the result of truckling to the South. Besides sharing the general fanaticism which mixed itself with the movement, the Abolitionists ignored the South's dilemma—the ultras totally, the moderates too much. "What would you do, brethren, were you in our place?" asked Dr. Richard Fuller, of Baltimore, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... which alone he is raised above the brute creation and his own physical nature!"—The overstrained and ridiculous pretensions of monks and ascetics were never thought to justify a return to unbridled licence of manners, or the throwing aside of all decency. The hypocrisy, cruelty, and fanaticism, often attendant on peculiar professions of sanctity, have not banished the name of religion from the world. Neither can "the unreasonableness of the reason" of some modern sciolists "so unreason our reason," ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... conviction, assurance, confidence; tenet, dogma, creed, opinion, doctrine, cult, view, principle; intuition; superstition, fanaticism. Antonyms: doubt, disbelief, skepticism, misgiving, incredulity. Associated Words: credulous, incredulous, credulity, credibility, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... or turned them against each other, with wild inconsistency; and while they fought singly, they were successively subdued. Neither the fortitude of Caractacus, nor the despair of Boadicea, nor the fanaticism of the Druids, could avert the slavery of their country, or resist the steady progress of the Imperial generals, who maintained the national glory, when the throne was disgraced by the weakest, or the most vicious of mankind. At the very time when Domitian, confined to his palace, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... and, perhaps, there is some moral inconvenience in the common forms of our grammars which give children so many obscure terms for material distinctions. Let me also exhort you to careful examination of what you read, if it be worth any perusal at all; such examination will be a safeguard from fanaticism, the universal origin of which is in the contemplation of phenomena without ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... have set me the example of plain speaking, I will answer that I do not believe you. But you will not do it! you choose rather to leave us miserable; and you coolly tell me it is the will of God that we should remain so. You may call this religion, but I call it wild fanaticism!' ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... semi-European; Cairo is fast becoming so; but Damascus, away from the highways of commerce, seated alone between the Lebanon and the Syrian Desert, still retains, in its outward aspect and in the character of its inhabitants, all the pride and fancy and fanaticism of the times of the Caliphs. With this judgment, in general terms, I agree; but not to its ascendancy, in every respect, over Cairo. True, when you behold Damascus from the Salahiyeh, the last slope of the Anti-Lebanon, it is the realization of all that ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... no voice; if they don't revolt, it is because they are lethargic; if you say they do not suffer, it is because you have not seen their heart's blood. But the day will come when you will see and hear. Then woe to those who base their strength on ignorance and fanaticism; woe to those who govern through falsehood, and work in the night, thinking that all sleep! When the sun's light shows the sham of all these phantoms, there will be a frightful reaction; all this strength conserved for centuries, all this poison distilled ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... happened? He knew quite accurately the answer Sir Hugo would have given: "A consumptive Jew, possessed by a fanaticism which obstacles and hastening death intensified, had fixed on Deronda as the antitype of some visionary image, the offspring of wedded hope and despair: despair of his own life, irrepressible hope in the propagation of his fanatical beliefs. The instance was ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... somebody else pupil. It can only result in the elucidation of popular interests and the firmer establishment of popular prejudice. On the other hand, an agitation which appeals skillfully to pet notions and to latent fanaticism may stampede the masses. The Middle Ages furnished a number of cases. The Mahdis who have arisen in Mohammedan Africa, and other Moslem prophets, have produced wonderful phenomena of this kind. The ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... doctrine and works to which he had held so fast; but I am no bigot,—which for a heretic is something remarkable,—and had no scruple about uniting with him in the service he proposed, without demur or protestation as to form or substance. Indeed, he disarmed fanaticism by the curious care he bestowed on making his works conformable to the faith that was in him; for, partly by inheritance and partly by industrious pains, his old house was undermined by a cellar of wine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... the Church from the corruptions which alone, as he imagined, prevented it from being as beneficent as it was powerful. The broad tolerance of the scholar and man of the world might well be revolted by the ruffianism, however genial, of one great light of Protestantism, and the narrow fanaticism, however learned and logical, of others; and to a cautious thinker, by whom, whatever his shortcomings, the ethical ideal of the Christian evangel was sincerely prized, it really was a fair question, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... replied the Duke, in a lower tone, "they are all, more or less, men of honour; but you must remember that there is a fanaticism in politics as well as in religion, and men will think that a great end will justify any intermediate means. An oak, planted in the sand, sir, is as soon blown down as any other tree; and it is not every heart that is firm and strong enough constantly ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James

... growing louder, more vehement, more insistent, like a strange fanaticism ever increasing in the bosom of ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens

... and loved, the controversial life. Sharing Gladstone's politics both in Church and State, he was in all secular matters a strong Liberal, and his hatred of Disraeli struck even Liberals as bordering on fanaticism. Yet his hatred of Disraeli was as nothing to his hatred of Froude. By nature "so over-violent or over-civil that every man with him was God or devil," he had erected Froude into his demon incarnate. Other men might be, Froude must be, wrong. He detested Froude's opinions. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... alas! what a change is there in the space of a few short hours; what a scene of desolation, what a lesson of the instability of sublunary things and the vanity of human grandeur! The glory of the city of York, of England, yea, almost of Europe, is now, through the fanaticism of a modern Erostratus, rendered comparatively a pile ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various

... no sooner left his mouth than up came a great Swede who was one of the workmen in Lloyd's, and he had Nahum Beals in a grasp as imperturbable as fate. The assassin, even with the strength of his fury of fanaticism, was as a reed in the grasp of this Northern giant. The Swede held him easily, walking him before him in a forced march. He had a hand of Nahum's in each of his, and he compelled Nahum's right hand ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... two hundred years ago, you are now not over-praised, but more worshipped, with more servility and ostentation, studied with more prying curiosity than you may approve. Are not the Molieristes a body who carry adoration to fanaticism? Any scrap of your handwriting (so few are these), any anecdote even remotely touching on your life, any fact that may prove your house was numbered 15 not 22, is eagerly seized and discussed by your too minute historians. ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... intuition that comes of long and changeful association with strange peoples, the changing countenance of the Afghan chief impresses me at once as the fiery signal of inbred Mussulman fanaticism, lighting up spontaneously at the unexpected and unannounced arrival of a lone Ferenghi in his presence. It savors somewhat of bearding a dangerous lion in his own den. He certainly betrays deep embarrassment at my appearance; ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... of pregnancy, there are other points in her regimen that are far from unimportant in their bearing on the fate of the child. One of these is the question of the mother's use of alcohol. Undoubtedly alcohol has been a cause of much fanaticism. But the declamatory extravagance of anti-alcoholists must not blind us to the fact that the evils of alcohol are real. On the reproductive process especially, on the mammary glands, and on the child, alcohol has an arresting and degenerative influence without any compensatory advantages. It ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... recovered his calmness, and spoke of his fears. Since he had been trying to work they seemed to have returned. He kept constant watch upon the press, pretending to have observed Martine prowling about it. Might they not work upon the fanaticism of this girl, and urge her to a bad action, persuading her that she was securing her master's eternal welfare? He had suffered so much from suspicion! In the dread of approaching solitude his former tortures returned—the tortures ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... some remarkable events during his sojourn at Tadousac. Religious fanaticism displayed itself in its worst form. The French had with them Father de Brebeuf, who was quite competent and willing to champion the cause of the Catholic faith, and especially when assailed by his own countrymen. A French Huguenot, named Jacques Michel, apparently headed ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne

... in the district. He declared, in a speech in Augusta, that he "was not afraid of anything on the earth, above the earth, or below the earth, except to do wrong." Mr. Stephens was elected. Religious fanaticism and race prejudice received a death blow in Georgia. "It writhed in pain, ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall

... Popedom, where the Catholics are greatly in the majority, religious liberty is granted by law. And even Spain, denominated by the Encyclopaedia Britannica "the most Catholic country in the world," exhibits "a general indifferentism to religion," meaning that the fanaticism and intolerance of former ages that caused thousands, and perhaps millions, to be slain, is rapidly dying out. In the vision before us, however, the special actions ascribed to this beast—speaking, working miracles, deceiving, making an image and imparting life to it, etc., which ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith

... characters, and those too in a light, in which they appeared to him; not clear and discriminate ideas. Hence a mixture of truth and error, of appropriate and inappropriate terms, which it is scarcely possible to disentangle. Part applies to fanaticism; part to enthusiasm; and no small portion of this latter to enthusiasm not pure, but as it exists in particular men, modified by their imperfections—and bad because not wholly enthusiasm. I regret this, because it is evidently the discourse of ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... promise of eyes of no less repelling expression; but the organs were concealed beneath a pair of enormous green goggles, through which they glared around with a fierceness that denounced the coming day of wrath. All was fanaticism, uncharitableness, and denunciation. Long, lank hair, a mixture of gray and black, fell down his neck, and in some degree obscured the sides of his face, and, parting on his forehead, fell in either direction in straight and formal ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... perpetual thralldom. This is a clear proof that the African is not intended for freedom, and at the same time shows that instinct teaches him, as it teaches all our domestic animals, to know the path of safety better than it can be learned in the school of fanaticism, or from the dialect ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit

... taking to Shakespeare at first probably grew more from the public voice, or perhaps from Southampton's influence, than from his own preference. Before the Poet's death, we may trace the beginnings of that corruption which, rather stimulated than discouraged by Puritan bigotry and fanaticism, reached its height some seventy years later; though its course was for a while retarded by King Charles the First, who, whatever else may be said of him, was unquestionably a man of as high and elegant tastes in literature and art ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... absurdity. They tell you, they have maturely examined the whole subject—that they have brought to the investigation all the aid that extensive reading and critical research can furnish—that they have carried the lights of science and philosophy into the dark regions of fanaticism—and have become perfectly convinced, that the whole system is an assemblage of the grossest errors. When, however, the array of argument is produced, its force seems to consist in the unwelcome impressions which the pure Gospel itself makes upon their minds. They can see no wisdom or ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin

... missionaries preached. Their exertions also, always supposing the tract in question to be entitled to credit, were rewarded by the conduct of their penitents, some of whom put away their vices, and others their mutual animosities. If this be fanaticism, then it were to be wished that such fanaticism should prevail widely in the south of France. "Out of the same mouth cannot proceed blessing and cursing;" and if the secret object of the Mission be to denounce the disaffected, or preach ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes

... subjected to degradations and restrictions of the worst kind. Now their condition, under a stronger government and some foreign influence, has slightly ameliorated, but is not yet entirely secure against the cruelty, fanaticism, and injustice of the Mullahs and officials in ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... leaders of civilisation, would this putrescent[2] tribe of hole-and-corner assassins take upon themselves, not to force into entering by an ignoble gate [the reference here is to a previous passage concerning the low door by which Spanish fanaticism ordained that the Cagots (lepers) of the Pyrenees should enter the churches in a stooping attitude], but to exclude from it altogether, and for ever. Briefly, then, for this licensed scurrility, in the first place; and, in the second, for this foul indignity of a spiteful exclusion ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... best for the country, wild extravagance both in action and expenditure resulted, leaving the sultan with depleted exchequer and the confidence of his people impaired. His intimacy with foreigners and his imitation of their ways were sufficient to rouse fanaticism and create dissatisfaction. His attempt to reorganize the finances by the systematic levy of taxes was hailed with delight, but the government was not strong enough to carry the measures through, and the money which should ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... then, the species of fanaticism taught in sectarian Christianity, by which Guiteau was led to assert that Garfield dead would be better off then living—being in Paradise —is more responsible than office seeking or political factionalism for ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... maintain its position, and on the part of the members to avoid the harsh treatment of the church. Religious progress, except in government-building, was not rapid, spirituality declined, and the fervent zeal for the right and for justice passed into fanaticism for purity. ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... was the son and grandson of Mahometan Martyrs, and he inherited that fanaticism, which made the old Seljuk and the young Michael surrender their lives in their missionary warfare against the enemies of their faith. Each day he repeated the five prayers prescribed for the disciples of Islam; each ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... the province of Kumis, probably Damaghan. At this point of his narrative Marco Polo gives an account of the "Old Man of the Mountain," the chief of the Mahometan sect called the Hashishins, who were noted for their religious fanaticism and terrible cruelty. He next visited the Khorassan town of Cheburgan, a city celebrated for its sweet melons, and then the noble city of Balkh, situated near the source of the Oxus. Next he crossed a country infested by lions to Taikan, a great salt-market frequented by ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... fame, had caused a disturbance in the Church, her enemies circulated scandals about the friends. The spotless and heavenly-minded woman smiled, and paid no heed to the wrong. But Father Lacombe, under the combined power of his Quietistic fanaticism, poor health, bitter persecutions, and relentless imprisonment, lost the balance of his mind altogether, and died. Fenelon also, interested in Madame Guion by her genuine piety, and by sympathy with many of her views, and finding this interest greatly deepened on personal acquaintance, formed ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... strength. Time has brought policy and justice to shake hands together at the right moment on the same road, and made that respectable and acceptable as a military necessity which was once repudiated as a fanaticism. Time has brought out the President's Emancipation Proclamation, and established it on a firm basis in the judgment and consent of all wise and true loyal men, North and South—to the great discomfiture of sundry politicians—the utterances ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... Irish Protestants it may be said that, once the first violence of fanaticism had died out, there was little attempt to enforce the legal enactments in all their hideous atrocity. According to the strict letter of the law, no Roman Catholic bishop, archbishop, or other dignitary; ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism that tyranny of those under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which they were visited; and the immense wealth they usually acquired in commerce, while it frequently placed them in danger, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... Augusts;—the fulness of time not now far off, one would say? It would complete the picture, could I go into the state of what is called "Religion" in Poland. Dissenterism, of various poor types, is extensive; and, over against it, is such a type of Jesuit Fanaticism as has no fellow in that day. Of which there have been truly savage and sanguinary outbreaks, from time to time; especially one at Thorn, forty years ago, which shocked Friedrich Wilhelm and the whole Protestant world. [See supra, vi. 64 (and many old Pamphlets on it).] ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... feelings may be with the slave,—so are mine, so are those of most of the Southern people. We all want men to be free; and no more do we want it now, than did the inhabitants of this country before we were born: the extravagant fanaticism and noisy zeal of the Northern abolitionists have not increased the sentiment of the country in favour of freedom a single item. But what can we do? This is a very grave and difficult subject. One thing is certain,—the perpetual abuse of our ...
— The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law • Ichabod S. Spencer

... "He professed to hate fanaticism, yet was himself a fanatic on the topic of toleration. I am telling you, Madame, about a character belonging to an age that is past. I fear I may not be able to make you understand, and I am sure I shall not be able to interest you. It was so long ago! But I will abridge as much as possible: ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... actions, and because religious wars, the horrors of intolerance, the impostures of priests, the despotism of kings, the degradation and stupidity of the people, have been the direct fatal effects of religions; and seeing that the blind fanaticism of martyrs and the brutal cruelty of tyrants is a hundred times more deplorable than a sacrifice equally agreeable to the victim and to the one who officiates at the sacrifice; and seeing that the enjoyment and giving of life is no less holy than the maceration and ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... monstrous, and what was deemed preternatural, infernal, and diabolical, throughout the whole mass of the people, in England as well as America. The public mind became infatuated and, drugged with credulity and superstition, was prepared to receive every impulse of blind fanaticism. The stories, thus collected and put everywhere in circulation, were of a nature to terrify the imagination, fill the mind with horrible apprehensions, degrade the general intelligence and taste, and dethrone the reason. They darken and dishonor the literature of that period. ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham

... most selfish ambition will not have been more hurtful than liberality run mad. And as I am not without apprehension of that fanaticism, which for some time has interfered even with Parliament, and to which there has been too much concession, I incline to the opinion that enthusiasm, as fanaticism, is generally more hurtful to society than scepticism. ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley

... [4] The fanaticism of the eastern Arabs now reasserted itself, and higher education In the Mohammedan countries of the East drew permanently to a close. A harsh, rigid orthodoxy, fatal to educational progress, now triumphed. The coming of the Turks only made matters worse, and with their advent education ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... ardor is heightened religious tone is lowered. The Puranic votary clinging to his one idea of god curses all them that believe in other aspects of the divinity. Blind bigotry fills the worshipper's soul. Religion becomes mere fanaticism. But there is also tolerance. Sometimes in one and the same Pur[a]na rival forms are honored. The modern Hindu sects are in part the direct development of Puranic doctrine. But most of the sects of to-day are of very recent date, though their principles ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... appeals, to the fanaticism which exists in every Pathan, were responded to in a marvellous manner. The villagers flew to arms. Still, it was thought and hoped that, when the first excitement caused by his appeals had died away, matters would calm down again. The hope, however, was short lived for, ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty

... Blinded by religious fanaticism, and convinced that God must fight upon their side and give victory to His chosen people, be their conduct never so cruel and their bearing never so arrogant, the Jewish race, though a mere handful of men, offered war to the mistress of the world. With little military organization ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock

... with perfect security. The selection of this spot and the character of its defence did great credit to the military genius of Weatherford,—and his eloquence, more than usually persuasive and inspiriting, filled his devoted followers with a courage strangely compounded of fanaticism and despair. ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... sent them a message wishing them God-speed and testifying to her own purpose to live entirely for the Saviour who had died for her. Her friends failing in their attempt to persuade her husband to exert his influence against what they considered fanaticism, enlisted the aid of Dr. Benson, Bishop of Gloucester, who had been Lord Huntingdon's teacher. But the bishop, as many another in later days, found that the Countess was fully equal to giving cogent ...
— Excellent Women • Various

... characters are extravagantly overdrawn. But the genius of the born dramatist is there. It is all vividly seen and powerfully bodied forth. What is more important, the play marks the birth of a new type—the tragedy of fanaticism. We are left at the end with a heightened feeling for the mysterious tangle of human destiny which makes it possible for a really noble nature such as Karl Moor to go ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... ardor, otherwise King Frederick might soon be expected in Paris with his army. The Marquise de Pompadour cried out warmly, 'Good! then I shall at last see a king!' In Germany, his enemies seek in vain to arouse the fanaticism of the people against the heretical king. Catholic Bavaria—the Palatinate-Main—enter murmuringly and reluctantly into this war against this Protestant king, although they wear the beads in their pockets, and the scapular over their shoulders. Even if Frederick the Second ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach

... general proportionate development of the whole man. These scientific facts, deductions, are divine too—precious counted parts of moral civilization, and, with physical health, indispensable to it, to prevent fanaticism. For abstract religion, I perceive, is easily led astray, ever credulous, and is capable of devouring, remorseless, like fire and flame. Conscience, too, isolated from all else, and from the emotional nature, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... suppose a proficiency in those inquiries which he would proscribe as dangerous. After all, we can discover no more reason why sciolists in metaphysics should bring that study into discredit, than that religion itself should be disparaged through the extravagance of fanaticism. To have met the subject fully, he ought to have shown, that not only those opinions he controverts are erroneous, but that all the systems of former metaphysicians were so likewise." In truth, Beattie would have ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... entering. "He periled his life to perpetrate this crime; and he also risked penal servitude for ten years. That he was not deterred by the double risk, proves the influence of some powerful motive; and that motive must have been either a personal feud of a very virulent kind, or else trade fanaticism. From this alternative there is ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade

... pressure of enemies, or the lack of food and pasturage in the countries left behind, or the discovery of better living conditions in the neighboring countries. But the impulse behind the two tremendous assaults of Islam upon Europe seems to have been religious fanaticism of a character and extent unmatched in history. The founder of the Faith, Mohammed, taught from 622 to 632. He succeeded in imbuing his followers with the passion of winning the world to the knowledge ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... University the force of living example should fire the student with a noble ambition to emulate the learning of learned men, and to follow in the footsteps of the explorers of new fields of knowledge. And the very air he breathes should be charged with that enthusiasm for truth, that fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession than much learning; a nobler gift than the power of increasing knowledge; by so much greater and nobler than these, as the moral nature of man is greater than the intellectual; for veracity is the heart of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... observes, "There is this distinction between the heathen deities and Christian saints, that the fables of the former were indebted for their existence to the flowing inspiration of the sublime poet, and the legends of the latter to the gloomy fanaticism of a lazy monk ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... plank in every platform for years, in order to go with Free Silver and Populism of the most extravagant type. These parties also had Suffrage planks. Altgeld and Debs, Coxey and Tillman were only men, but Mary Ellen Lease furnished to the campaign that strain of exalted fanaticism that at once points out ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... was a somewhat judicious man, and although he would not sanction what he called church fanaticism, yet he had some self-respect, and had never allowed himself to reach ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris

... ancient date. The very glass from which the dying man drank his milk dated from the glorious days of Holland when William the Silent pitted his Northern stubbornness and deep diplomacy against the fire and fanaticism of Alva. Many objects in the room had a story, had been in the daily use of hands long since vanished, could tell the history of half a dozen human lives lived out and now forgotten. The air itself smelt of ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... French Revolution, when if we were misled, we erred in the company of some, who are accounted very good men now—rather than any tendency at this time to Republican doctrines—assisted us in assuming a style of writing, while the paper lasted, consonant in no very under-tone to the right earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was now to insinuate, rather than recommend, possible abdications. Blocks, axes, Whitehall tribunals, were covered with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis—as Mr. Bayes says, never naming the thing directly—that the keen eye of an Attorney General was insufficient to detect the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... subjected to the hateful conjectures of Mazarin and other historians; but he who actually struck the blow invariably affirmed that he had no accomplice, and that he was carried forward by an uncontrollable instinct. If his mind were at all acted on from without, it was probably by the epidemic fanaticism of the times, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... la Superstition et le Fanatisme fassent place a la Philosophie. (It must necessarily happen that superstition and fanaticism give place to philosophy.) Kings persecute persons, priests opinion. Without kings, men must be safe; and without priests, minds must ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... here said might bear to be followed up at far greater length than the present occasion will admit of. But the main point is one, I think, of no small importance, that all fanaticism and superstition on the one hand, and all unbelief and coldness of heart on the other, arise from what is in fact idolatry,—the putting some other object, whether it be called a religious or moral one,—and ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... by the danger he had just run, his hair dishevelled, his look so proud yet so mild, struck the crowd who beheld him with admiration, and almost with fanaticism; the women, above all, expressed themselves with that imagination which is an almost universal gift in Italy, and even gives a nobleness to the conversation of the common people. They threw themselves on their knees before him, ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael

... the better if we do not allow frightfulness and fanaticism to impress us so deeply that we throw up our hands peevishly, and lose interest in the longer run of time because we have lost faith in the future of man. There is no ground for this despair, because all the ifs on which, as James said, our destiny ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... truth about the painting of the nineteenth century—and after! The critics were unanimous in their violent condemnation of Delacroix's works: "the compositions of a sick man in delirium," "the fanaticism of ugliness," "barbarous execution," "an intoxicated broom"—such are some of the terms of abuse showered upon him. The gentlest among them commiserate the talent which here and there can be seen "struggling with the systematic bizarrerie and the disordered technique of the artist, just ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies

... and ended suddenly, and more or less unaccountably, at the time of the Reformation. The society of this period was supposed to be lawless and chaotic; its ethics a mere conscious hypocrisy; its art gloomy and barbarous fanaticism only; its literature the formless jargon of savages; and as to its science, that side of human intelligence was supposed to be an invention of the time when the Middle Ages had been dead two ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele

... that shone on the baron's face forbade all discussion; I listened in silence. His voice had a contagious heat which made my bosom burn within me; his fanaticism stirred my heart as the anger of another makes our nerves vibrate. I followed him in silence to his house, where I saw the nameless child lying mysteriously folded to its mother's breast. The babe heard my step and turned its head toward me; its eyes were not those ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... 1562 a cloud of black and deadly portent was thickening over France. Surely and swiftly she glided towards the abyss of the religious wars. None could pierce the future; perhaps none dared to contemplate it: the wild rage of fanaticism and hate, friend grappling with friend, brother with brother, father with son; altars profaned, hearthstones made desolate; the robes of Justice herself bedrenched with murder. In the gloom without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Descending the pulpit the venerable priest passed through a sobbing congregation to a garret in one of the Faubourgs. There were but few, however, who imitated the dignified protest of the cure of St. Marguerite. Many a pulpit rang with fiery denunciations, which recalled the savage fanaticism of the League. Some of the younger clergy and a few of the bishops were on the side of the early Revolutionists. The Abbe Fouchet was the Peter the Hermit of the crusade for Liberty, and so popular were his sermons in Notre Dame that a seat there fetched twenty-four sous. But ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... as the above is instructive reading as showing the low calibre of the minds that are influenced by it. Yet such writings and sermons have more power among the Boers than any other arguments, appealing as they do to the fanaticism and vanity of their nature, which causes them to believe that the Divinity is continually interfering on their behalf at the cost of other people. It will be noticed that the references given are all to the Old Testament, and nearly all refer to ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard

... pro-consul finds it necessary to smash one of the man-slaying machines that loom ominous on his borders, or some savage potentate makes an incursion into territory of a British colony, or some fierce outburst of Mahommedan fanaticism raises up a Mahdi in mid-Africa. In a moment Tommy Atkins is marched off to the troop-ship, and swept across the seas, heart-sick and sea-sick, and miserable exceedingly, to tight the Queen's enemies in foreign parts. When he arrives ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... Omar, they never seem to arrive at any conclusions which have not previously been used by them as a starting-point. All this makes for fanaticism,—which, however, with so cowardly a people, is more likely to be noisy than violent,—and all such sinful sports as cock-fighting, bull fights, gambling, and the like, are forbidden by law to the ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... assert, that possessing inferior intellects, they are incapable of deriving advantage from the general pursuit of knowledge, and therefore must be confined to a few primary truths, of which man is to be the judge. The first supposition we leave with the fanaticism that may have given it birth, and with which it so well harmonizes; the second we surrender to those atheistic fools and swindling politicians who can see no excellence in knowledge, save as it may minister ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... patriotism. The motive power in his patriotism was devotion to the law and customs of his race. In this respect he was a leader supremely acceptable to the Hasideans or Pious, who rallied about his standard. In any other age or setting his devotion would have seemed but fanaticism. The situation, however, was extremely critical. Disloyalty to the law and the distinctive rites of Judaism was treason. If ever in the world's history it was justifiable to meet force by force and to unshield the sword in behalf of religion, this certainly ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent

... words that sound high amongst the multitude; and all men are branded by those names, who are not for setting up Fanaticism and a Common-wealth. To call short and useless Parliaments, can be no intention of the Government; because from such means the great end of Settlement cannot be expected. But no Physician can command ...
— His Majesties Declaration Defended • John Dryden

... mere philanthropist of modern times,—the man who professes to love the whole human race without loving God, or indeed often believing that there is a God to love. To us he seems as unloving a person as the mere fanatic. Meanwhile, plain people say, we will have nothing to do with either fanaticism or philanthropy,—we will try to do our duty where God has put us, and to behave justly and charitably by our neighbours; but beyond that we cannot go. We will not pretend to what we ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous of all the errors of mankind. A false leader in religion may be more fatal than an incompetent general of an army, therefore ministers of the gospel and teachers have the greatest task imposed on them of any of God's creation. When once one's religion ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick

... far quicker and far abler men behind him, in his knowledge of the sorely harassed tribes of the eastern Soudan. He liked them; he could enter into their hatred of the old Turkish rule, he could understand their fanaticism, and their pretence of fanaticism under the ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason

... danger to every state is, to render its subjects justly discontented; nor is there in polities or science any more effectual secret for their security than to establish in their people a firm opinion that no change can be for their advantage. It is true that bigotry and fanaticism may for a time draw great multitudes of people from a knowledge of their true and substantial interest. But upon this I have to remark three things. First, that such a temper can never become universal, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... art in heaven,' would overcome her with such a manifestation that she would become cold and almost faint; and though she uttered much, yet she told us that the divinest things she saw could not be spoken. These things could not be fanaticism, for she was a person of a singular evenness of nature, and of great skill and discretion in temporal matters, and of an exceeding humility, sweetness, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... of the Asiatic Sarmatia into Sweden, with the great design of forming, in that inaccessible retreat of freedom, a religion and a people which, in some remote age, might be subservient to his immortal revenge; when his invincible Goths, armed with martial fanaticism, should issue in numerous swarms from the neighbourhood of the Polar circle to chastise the oppressors of mankind.... Notwithstanding the mysterious obscurity of the Edda, we can easily distinguish two persons confounded ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... innocently wicked little dog. It is the laughter of pure frolic without unkindness. To have laughed with the little dog as a child is the best preservative against mirthless laughter in later years—the horse laughter of brutality, the ugly laughter of spite, the acrid laughter of fanaticism. The world of nursery rhymes, the old world of Mrs. Slipper-Slopper, is the world of natural things, of quick, healthy motion, of ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock

... and successful struggle of the Franks admonished the sultan that his triumph was not yet secure; he listened with reverence to a solemn adjuration in the name of the common Father of mankind; and a sentiment of human sympathy mollified the rigor of fanaticism and conquest. He consented to accept the city, and to spare the inhabitants. The Greek and Oriental Christians were permitted to live under his dominion, but it was stipulated, that in forty days all the Franks and Latins should evacuate Jerusalem, and be safely conducted to the seaports ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... brought about the expulsion of the Medici in 1494. Michelangelo was one of his constant listeners at S. Marco and in the Duomo. He witnessed those stormy scenes of religious revival and passionate fanaticism which contemporaries have impressively described. The shorthand-writer to whom we owe the text of Savonarola's sermons at times breaks off with words like these: "Here I was so overcome with weeping that I could not go on." Pico della ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... aroused. Could those foreign philosophers have ascended to moral causes, instead of vapouring forth fanciful notions, they might have struck at the true cause of the deficiency in our national genius. The jealousy of puritanic fanaticism had persecuted these arts from the first rise of the Reformation in this country. It had not only banished them from our churches and altar-pieces, but the fury of the people, and the "wisdom" of parliament, had alike combined to mutilate and even efface what little remained of painting ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... a misanthropy which springs from insight,—a misanthropy which is lounging, languid, sad, and depressing,—a misanthropy which remorselessly looks through cursing misanthropes and chirping men of the world with the same sure, detecting glance of reason,—a misanthropy which has no fanaticism, and which casts the same ominous doubt on subjectively morbid as on subjectively moral action,—a misanthropy which has no respect for impulses, but has a terrible perception of spiritual laws,—this is a misanthropy which can expect no wide recognition; and it would be vain to deny that traces ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... feuds. Instead of this, the cimeter was invoked and worshipped as the sole possible arbitrator; and truce there was none until the silence of desolation brooded over those once fertile fields. How savage was the fanaticism, and how blind the worldly wisdom, which could have co-operated to such a result! The cause must have lain in the unaccommodating nature of the Mahometan institutions, in the bigotry of the Mahometan leaders, and in the defect of expansive views on the part of their legislator. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... recount it in solemn and delicious intimacy. Now, philosophically, he stamped on his pride as on a fire. And he affected to be relieved at the decision that the girl had been moved by naught but a sort of fanaticism. But he was not relieved by the decision. The decision itself was not genuine. He still clung to the notion that she had followed him for himself. He preferred that she should have taken a fancy to him, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... made the vehicle of deeper emotions and interests than perhaps a northern people could ever find in art, pure and simple, it was not like the time that followed it, a "prosaic" age. Enthusiasm burned fierce and clear, displaying itself in the passionate polemic of Milton, in the fanaticism of Bunyan and Fox, hardly more than in the gentle, steadfast search for knowledge in Burton, and the wide and vigilant curiousness of Bacon. Its eager experimentalism tried the impossible; wrote ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... the Aohanga Maoris at his beck and call. The surveyors say he is stirring up his tribe to make trouble over the survey of the Ngotu block, and they had some hair-raising stories to tell me of his superstitious cruelty. He is really half-crazed with fanaticism, they say, and if you bump up against any of his rotten notions, he'll stick at nothing in the way of vengeance. As you saw yourself, he'd have killed Dick this afternoon hadn't we two been ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various

... own province. Not satisfied with using, as we see in so many of those ghastly photographs, their own army as the executioners, the Austro-Hungarians also organized local bands among the lower classes of the towns, and in so doing they availed themselves of any latent religious fanaticism among the Moslems. From the day of the Archduke's assassination it was the Serbs who suffered most; and many onlookers must have expected in the autumn of 1918 that they would take a very drastic revenge. For ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein

... under control, merely a bitter remark or a chilling and ironical laugh. It is an interesting fact that a jest may serve as well to give expression to the "feelings" as an expletive or any other emotional expression. All forms of fanaticism, fixed ideas, phobias, ideals, and cherished illusions may be explained as the effects of mental mechanisms ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... Fayette, who gave him the rank of captain in 1832. When the amateur of the best of all possible republics was removed from the command of the National guard, Oscar Husson, whose devotion to the new dynasty amounted to fanaticism, was appointed major of a regiment sent to Africa at the time of the first expedition undertaken by the Prince-royal. The Vicomte de Serizy chanced to be the lieutenant-colonel of this regiment. At the affair of the Makta, where the field had to be abandoned to the Arabs, Monsieur de Serizy ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac

... easy credulity fomented by the over-development of religious fanaticism, has constituted from the beginning to this day one of the defects unfortunately so widespread still among the native inhabitants of the country * * *. Devoted to their inherited traditions and customs ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera

... to traitors or the intervention of foreign powers, rather than bequeath to the next generation a broken Union, and an interminable civil war, I would light the torch of fanaticism and destroy all that the labor of two generations has accumulated. Better a desert and universal poverty than disunion; better the war of the French Revolution than an oligarchy founded upon the labor of slaves. But, sir, there ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... imitation of the illustrious, for the ennoblement of their own lives. No book has sold more largely than the Imitation of Christ. But was it not often a blind struggle in the dark, an attempt to reach a goal never clearly seen. Wandering in a labyrinth of fanaticism, agonizing in the effort to distort nature, the biographical record of religious aspiration serves to show how nearly multitudes may approach the boundary line of insanity in their protracted periods of causeless mental agony and in their fierce hostility to heresy and to science. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various

... out." "Death and furies! what does she do out?" Doubtless, if any "fanatic" had claimed the right of woman to walk out of doors, he would have been deemed crazy in Athens; had he claimed the right of a modest married woman to be seen out of doors it would have been considered fanaticism, and I do not know but that the Herald of that day would have branded him as an infidel. But spite of the anchored conservatism of others, women got out of doors and the country grew, and the world turned round, and so modern Europe ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... reverence,—when they sneered at that which we held sacred, and reviled that which we counted honorable,—when, green-eyed and gloating, they saw through their glasses not only darkly, but disjointed and askance,—when devotion became to them fanaticism, and love of liberty was lust of power,—did virtue go out of them, or had it never been in? This, at least, was wrought: when one part of the temple of our reverence was undermined, the whole structure came down. They ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... here that the question became to the Free States a practical question. There could be no "fanaticism" in meeting it at this stage. What usually goes under the name of fanaticism is the habit of uncompromising assault on a thing because its principles are absurd or wicked; what usually goes under the name of common sense is the disposition to assail it at that point where, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... races, when all peoples are free, when there are neither tyrants nor slaves, colonies nor mother countries, when justice rules and man is a citizen of the world, the pursuit of science alone will remain, the word patriotism will be equivalent to fanaticism, and he who prides himself on patriotic ideas will doubtless be isolated as a dangerous disease, as a menace ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... seen "Thoughts on Political Fanaticism," in answer to your admirable pamphlet. The author appears to me to proclaim his servile attachment to Bonaparte, without in any degree refuting your arguments. When you tell me that Peter Tupper is a son of the jurat, ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper

... call fads, and which are a peculiar feature of English and North American civilisation. Such reforms as are carried out in this country are usually effected not by the reason of the many, but by the fanaticism of the few. A just balance may on the whole be preserved, but there is not much balance in the ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... available troops in the harbor. These questions were put by a resident of that city named Edmund Ruffin; an old man, whose later years had been devoted to the formation of disunion lodges, and who became subsequently noted for firing the first gun at Fort Sumter. His love of slavery amounted to fanaticism. When the cause of the Rebellion became hopeless, he refused to survive it, ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday

... about the church of your Henry. It surprises me that a child of seven years should find pleasure even once a day in the long English service—too long, according to my doxy, for matured years. As to fanaticism, it depends on a defect of intellect rather than on an excess of the adoring faculty. The latter cannot, I think, be too fully developed. How I shall like you to see our Wiedeman! He is a radiant little creature, really, yet he won't talk; he does nothing but gesticulate, only making his will ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... fully revealed the incapacity of the government to provide for its wants, these men were naturally looked to to construct a system which would save it from anarchy. And their great capacities, their high disinterested purposes, their freedom from all fanaticism and illiberality, and their earnest, unconquerable faith in the destiny of the country, enabled them to found that government which now upholds and protects the whole fabric of liberty in ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... wrought by his fervent prayer, and finds only that the ardor of his faith and hers has brought death instead of life to them both,—the tragedy of his son Elias, who dies like Samson with his foes for an equally impossible faith, and by the very violence of his fanaticism removes the goal of socialist endeavor farther than ever into the dim future. Bjoernson has written nothing more profoundly moving than these plays, with their twofold treatment of essentially the same theme, nor has he written anything which offers a clearer revelation of his own rich ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne

... would descend to guard the battlements when human help had failed. These enthusiasts still formed the true nerve of the nation—the class that might have saved the State, if salvation had been possible. Even as it was, the energy of their fanaticism prolonged the siege until resistance seemed no longer physically possible. The hero developed by the crisis was Francesco Ferrucci, a plebeian who had passed his youth in manual labour, and who now displayed rare military genius. He fell fighting outside the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... insane ambition for martyrdom. "We praise not those," say the Smyrnaeans, "who deliver themselves up, since the gospel does not so teach us." [58:5] In these letters Ignatius speaks as a vain babbler, drunken with fanaticism; Polycarp, in his Epistle, expresses himself like an humble-minded Presbyterian minister in his sober senses. Ignatius is made to address Polycarp as if he were a full-blown prelate, and tells the people under his care, "He that honoureth the bishop is honoured of God; he that doth aught against ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen

... ship them thence to China at his own expense. Moreover, on the pretext that the iron supplied to the Royal Stores had been worked by infidels, the Government refused to pay for the deliveries, and Salgado became a ruined victim of religious fanaticism. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... the window, looking at the lights against the sky and thinking very definitely of something that troubled him and drew his lips into a tight, thin line. He was a young man of the type described usually as "zealous" and "earnest," and a light that was almost the light of fanaticism shone in his eyes. A dying parishioner was no more of a novelty to Mr. Heath, than one of Mrs. Wilder's dinner-parties was to her guests, and yet the woman on the bed appealed to his pity as few others ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie

... contrive it, that my wife, if they ever mean to send me one at all, shall be a member of the Episcopal church. There is about that church, what attaches to no other sect, a sort of dignified reserve, that never breaks out in four-day meetings, revivals, or any other similar ebullition of fanaticism ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... flowing healthfully upon the Negro is polluted and poisoned by the abolitionists and rendered the source of discontent and excitement."[2] He believed that education thus perverted would become equally dangerous to the master and the slave, and that while fanaticism continued its war upon the South the measures of necessary precaution and defense had to be continued. He asserted, however, that education would not only unfit the Negro for his station in life and prepare him for insurrection, but would prove wholly ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson

... dangerously revolutionary. The lack of political competence is shown in both cases. We wish, of course, neither of these excesses in our own country. And yet we do have to cope at the present time with both a tendency to fanaticism, radicalism and intense partisanship, and with indifference and ignorance of the nature and purpose of our institutions and government. Both the indifference and the partisanship play into the hands of party politics, and no advantages gained by the balance of parties in opposition ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... burning of Pennsylvania Hall, at a social gathering one evening, Dr. Moore in conversation with Mrs. Mott strongly condemned the fanaticism and impolicy of the Abolitionists, and especially the women; he said they should do all their reform work through the Friends' meeting. Being much excited, in the course of his remarks, he became very insulting. Mrs. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... would go to some other place. In some of the houses the people were asleep already, and in others they were playing cards; we hated those houses, were afraid of them, and we talked of the fanaticism, callousness, and nullity of these respectable families, these lovers of dramatic art whom we had frightened so much, and I wondered how those stupid, cruel, slothful, dishonest people were better than the drunken and superstitious peasants of Kurilovka, ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff

... not less conspicuous than the wheat. Who can doubt that among the professing Christians of the second century, as among the professing Christians of the nineteenth, there was plenty of folly, plenty of rabid nonsense, plenty of gross fanaticism? who will even venture to affirm that, separated in great measure from the intellect and civilization of the world for one or two centuries, Christianity, wonderful as have been its fruits, had the development perfectly worthy of its inestimable germ? Who will venture to affirm ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... fatness is to-day in unrest and leanness because these impressions have been resisted. But are there not impressions given by an evil spirit? Most certainly, and these impressions have led many an honest soul into the wildest of fanaticism. Thank God, by living very humble, with all our motives very pure, and by acquaintance with the Word of God, we may know the voice of the Spirit of God and that of the evil spirit I have known people to receive and obey ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr

... the First Consul, whom he loved with such tenderness that in conversation the venerable old man continually addressed the young general as "my son." The peasants of Pavia, having revolted because their fanaticism had been excited by false assertions that the French wished to destroy their religion, the Archbishop of Milan, in order to prove that their fears were groundless, often showed himself in a ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... Tascott says: "Ungoverned passions in the parents may unloose the furies of unrestrained madness in the minds of their children. Even untempered religious enthusiasm may beget a fanaticism that can not be restrained within the ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... the North of England was the Abbot of Iona. But Oswiu's queen brought with her from Kent the loyalty of the Kentish Church to the Roman See; and the visit of two young thegns to the Imperial City raised their love of Rome into a passionate fanaticism. The elder of these, Benedict Biscop, returned to denounce the usages in which the Irish Church differed from the Roman as schismatic; and the vigour of his comrade Wilfrid stirred so hot a strife that Oswiu was prevailed upon to summon in 664 ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green

... heat came upward like a furnace blast, and the smoke was a great red cloud among the stalactites. Round and round that holocaust the thousands did their sword-dance, yelling as the devils yelled at Khinjan's birth. They needed no wine to craze them. They were drunk with fanaticism, frenzy, lust! ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... eternal bliss beyond life; reject it, and die, with the full certainty of eternal anguish beyond death." When the crusading Christians and the Saracenic hosts met in battle, the conflict was the very frenzy of fanaticism. "There the question of salvation or damnation lay on the ground between the marshalled armies, to be fought for and carried by the stronger." Christ and Allah encountered, and the endless fate of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... THIRD. The Fanaticism of the first English and French Revolutionists. English Sectaries. French Parties. Feuillans. Girondists. Faction of Hebert. Jacobins. ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... deliberately, however, in both cases; because the Papacy at this period committed itself to a policy of immoral, retrograde, and cowardly repression of the most generous of human impulses under the pressure of selfish terror; because the Spaniards abandoned themselves to a dark fiend of religious fanaticism; because they were merciless in their conquests and unintelligent in their administration of subjugated provinces; because they glutted their lusts of avarice and hatred on industrious folk of other creeds ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... spite, inspired, in great measure, by sheer envy of Southern superiority, in part by angry hate because of the troubles, perils, and losses of the war, and, in a very small degree, by honest though absurd fanaticism. They did not believe that it was done for the sake of the slave, to secure his liberty or to establish his rights; but they believed most devoutly that it was done solely and purposely to injure the master, to punish the rebel, and to still further cripple and impoverish the ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... religion Thorpe had added a fanaticism, and over the fanaticism was gradually creeping a film of doubt. To the conscientious energy which a sense of duty supplied, was added the tremendous kinetic force of a love turned into other channels. And in the wild nights ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... of the Pope's voyage to Vienna. The Imperial Secretary here assures me, that the Emperor will not recede from the plans of reformation he has adopted. Some persons having suggested, to him, that fanaticism might possibly endeavor to put a period to his progress by assassination, he replied, that he had no apprehensions on that score, for his brother's firmness and sentiments being known to be the same, nothing could be hoped ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various

... the ruins of the wall; and told me that it had been broken down by the order of the Emperor Aurangzeb.[4] History to these people is all a fairy tale; and this emperor is the great destroyer of everything that the Muhammadans in their fanaticism have demolished of the Hindoo sculpture or architecture; and yet, singular as it may appear, they never mention his name with any feelings of indignation or hatred. With every scene of his supposed outrage against their gods or their temples, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... distance, through the newspapers, it was as though the country had gone back a few centuries, Christophe discovered that France—skeptical France—was a nation of fanatics. But it was impossible for him to find out the meaning of their fanaticism. For or against religion? For or against Reason? For or against the country?—They were for and against everything. They were fanatics for the pleasure ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... member of the last school, but I was gradually working my way up to the second, and I hoped with luck to qualify for the first. My acquaintances approved my progress. Letchford said I had a core of fanaticism in my slow nature, and that I would end by waving the ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan



Words linked to "Fanaticism" :   zealotry, intolerance



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com