“Moral crusade: Public activity undertaken by middle-aged men who are cheating on their wives or diddling little boys. Moral crusades are particularly popular among those seeking power for their own personal pleasure, politicians who can't think of anything useful to do with their mandates, and religious professionals suffering from a personal inability to communicate with their god.”

"Moral crusade"
The Doubter's Companion (1994)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Moral crusade: Public activity undertaken by middle-aged men who are cheating on their wives or diddling little boys. M…" by John Ralston Saul?
John Ralston Saul photo
John Ralston Saul 85
Canadian author and essayist 1947

Related quotes

Robert Anton Wilson photo
Poul Anderson photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo

“Anything that is moral for a group to do is moral for one person to do.”

There must be a flaw in that, since I’ve always been taught that it is wrong to take the law in your own hands. But I can’t find the flaw and it sounds axiomatic, self-evident. Switch it around. If something is wrong for one person to do, can it possibly be made right by having a lot of people (a government) agree to do it together? Even unanimously?
If anything is wrong, it is wrong—and vox populi can’t change it.
Source: Podkayne of Mars (1963), Chapter 13 (p. 169)

André Maurois photo
Albert Einstein photo

“You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to Guy H. Raner Jr. (28 September 1949), from article by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1997)
1940s
Context: I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.

Alice A. Bailey photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
Marcus Aurelius photo
Bernard Cornwell photo

Related topics