Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Personality cults are an insult to Islam.
We explored cults in 'Sound of My Voice.' I think cults have an underlying spiritual quality.
Cults, or related social movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, result in massive military expenses.
That's really the nature of how cults get you - by starting slow, promising to help you realize your goals.
The history of the Church of Rome is a constant leakage of members into such breakaway cults, which go on splitting.
Even small cults are a serious cost on the world economy, to victims, their families, employers, friends, and credit-card companies.
There is a great interest in comparative religion and a desire to understand faiths other than our own and even to experiment with exotic cults.
The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power.
I'm actually loving the soundtrack to 'The Secret Circle' that our music supervisor Liza Richardson puts together, like Washed Out and Cults, but my favorite band is Bootstraps.
The Social Affairs Ministry and the police will continue to fight against the abuse of women and children. The ministry battles the harmful phenomenon of cults on a daily basis.
It might seem perverse for honestly religious people to group their faiths with those of the sadists and megalomaniacs who run most cults, but a growing number are doing just that.
When you become a sannyasin, I initiate you into freedom, and into nothing else... I am destroying your ideologies, creeds, cults, dogmas, and I am not replacing them with anything else.
But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.
I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved.
I'm all for 'tools,' not 'schools,' of therapy. To me, the schools of therapy compete much like religions, or even cults, all claiming to know the cause and to have the best method for treating people.
You see, 30 years ago I didn't have near the audience I have now. My tapes on the cults have reached a circulation of 15 million. those are not my figures but the figures of the people who distribute them.
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.
The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual.
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.
I don't think I'm mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.
Fourteen-year-old boys are not part of a well-regulated militia. Members of wacky religious cults are not part of a well-regulated militia. Permitting unregulated citizens to have guns is destroying the security of this free state.
The food habits of the different classes of Hindus have been as fixed and stratified as their cults. Just as Hindus can be classified on their basis of their cults, so also they can be classified on the basis of their habits of food.
Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.
The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.
'The Leftovers' takes place three years after 2% of the population has gone missing. And it's about how that changes society. Cults form as a result, and it drastically changes home life for a lot of people, including the Garvey family, which is the family I belong to.
The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.
At first, laws evolved out of religious doctrines. It followed that they were recognized only when advantageous to those who practiced the same religion and who appeared equals under the protection of the same gods. For the members of all other cults, there was neither law nor mercy.
Everything we do these days - our lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusal to engage with the mandates of reality, our fidelity to cults of technology and limitless growth, our narcissistic national exceptionalism - all of this propels us toward the realm where souls abandon all hope.
Political as well as religious cults can be distinguished from legitimate organizations by their use of doublethink. Though political cults espouse extremist ideologies, not extremist theologies, operationally they are virtually identical to religious cults, and they also go to great lengths to control the vocabularies of their members.
One of the things that can be helpful in terms of an explanation is to look at the ways in which cults are similar to abusive relationships. Nobody seeks out an abusive partner, but so many people stay in these relationships longer than they should - they make excuses, they ignore red flags, and they allow themselves to be emotionally manipulated.
