Cult Quotes

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Aurelia was just about to take a sip of a mimosa when Mother Guardian snatched the flute away and promptly downed the drink in one gulp. Burping unashamedly, she said, "We can't have the validity of the marriage contracts jeopardized because the bride got rat-assed on her wedding day.”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Too pissed off to care, Aurelia interrupted him. "No, I will not wait just one moment!" Piercing him with her best scary stare, she said, "It surprises me that no one has pointed out your glaringly obvious agenda, so let me be the first.”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“Here's an easy way to figure out if you're in a cult: If you're wondering whether you're in a cult, the answer is yes.”
― Stephen Colbert, I Am America

“The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited

“The salpinx is not simply an instrument of summoning. It is also an instrument of binding. Since you followed its sorrowful tones to my side, you are now bound to me like man is bound to treachery.”

Jeremiah Hobb”
― Frank Lambert, Cult of the Clan

“If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others.

Now a narrative is a story, not a logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are a whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. "Storyteller" and at the same time "character". It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.

Yet without a proper ego nobody can create a personal narrative, any more than you can drive a car without an engine, or cast a shadow without a real physical object. But once you've consigned your ego to someone else, where on earth do you go from there?

At this point you receive a new narrative from the person to whom you have entrusted your ego. You've handed over the real thing, so what comes back is a shadow. And once your ego has merged with another ego, your narrative will necessarily take on the narrative created by that ego.

Just what kind of narrative?

It needn't be anything particularly fancy, nothing complicated or refined. You don't need to have literary ambitions. In fact, the sketchier and simpler the better. Junk, a leftover rehash will do. Anyway, most people are tired of complex, multilayered scenarios-they are a potential letdown. It's precisely because people can't find any fixed point within their own multilayered schemes that they're tossing aside their own self-identity.”
― Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

“The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground”
― Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

“No evil ever came from a woman’s womb that wasn’t placed there first by a man.’... Tantie Neptune, Lucifer's Key by Charles A. Cornell, due 2013”
― Charles A. Cornell

“Some people with DID present their narratives of sadistic abuse in a quite matter-of-fact way, without perceptible affect. This may sometimes be done as a way of protecting themselves, and the listener, from the emotional impact of their experience. We have found that people describing trauma in a flat way, without feeling, are usually those who have been more chronically abused, while those with affect still have a sense of self that can observe the tragedy of betrayal and have feelings about it. In some cases, this deadpan presentation can also be the result of cult training and brainwashing. Unfortunately, when a patient describes a traumatic experience without showing any apparent emotion, it can make the listener doubt whether the patient is telling the truth.
(page 119, Chapter 9, Some clinical implications of believing or not believing the patient)”
― Graeme Galton, Forensic Aspects of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Human psychology is that anything you do in a group feels right. People as a group can kill someone and call it religious because it feels right to them. Religion and righteousness are not the same thing. Religion is about going beyond right and wrong and seeing things as they are without any prejudices and judgements.”
― Shunya

“Bravery isn't when you go looking for trouble; bravery is when trouble comes looking for you.”
― P.I. Barrington, Final Deceit

“Isolating oneself into a narrowly defined victim group promotes a view of others as irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst, which eventually only leads to further alienation. Gangs, extremist political parties, and religious cults may provide solace, but they rarely foster the mental flexibility needed to be fully open to what life has to offer and as such cannot liberate their members from their traumas. Well-functioning people are able to accept individual differences and acknowledge the humanity of others.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China

“What’s a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.”
― Robert Altman

“-You said this wasn't a cult.
-Secret society. There's a difference.
-Not from where I'm standing.
-Then take a seat.”
― Jennifer Bosworth, Struck

“I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the world, because when they become a renunciate, they discard themselves totally, thereby abandoning the world. In other words, Aum is a collection of people who have accepted the end. People who continue to hold out hope for the near future still have an attachment to the world. If you have attachments, you will not discard your Self, but for Renunciates it's as if they've leaped right off the cliff. And taking a giant leap like that feels good. They lose something - but gain something in return.”
― Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

“You wanted the truth. Or are you afraid of it now?”
― Courtney Summers, The Project

“But the existence of a cult does not mean that images appropriate to it automatically follow.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“In my view the study of fairy origins assumes a greater degree of importance than popular opinion is wont to concede to it. Indeed, the ideas associated with it strike at the very roots of human belief and primitive methods of reasoning. It is scarcely to be questioned that the explanation of fairy origins is of the utmost value to the better comprehension of primitive religion. Later it will be made clear that, for the writer at least, the whole tradition of Faerie reveals quite numerous and excellent proofs of its former existence as a primitive and separate cult and faith, more particularly as regards its appearance and tradition in these islands.”
― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

“Religion, like science, is only noteworthy when it emphasizes a matter of what is true rather than whose belief is greater or lesser or which deity works for whom. Sincere religion and tested science are similar in that their assertions can be argued logically and objectively; otherwise, we get false cults and babble.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“That’s all religion is. Strategy.”
― Stephanie Oakes, The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly

“A narcissistic church leader will preemptively create under-educated, group-dependent followers. By contrast, Jesus admired independent thinkers, exampled at Mt 9:22, where the woman with an issue of blood bucked convention in favor of her Bible-trained faith.
pg 38”
― Michael Ben Zehabe, Lamentations: how narcissistic leaders torment church and family

“Cult Criteria: charismatic leaders, mind-altering behaviors, sexual and financial exploitation, and us vs them mentality toward non-members and an "ends justify the means" philosophy. "Cult" has typically been applied to group who have some degree of supernatural beliefs, though that isn't always the case. Angels and Demons don't make their way into cosmetic pyramid schemes. The result is always the same. A power imbalance built on the member's devotion, hero-worship and absolute trust, which frequently facilitates abuse on the part of unaccountable leaders. The glue that keeps this trust in tact is members believe their leaders have a rare access to transcend wisdom, which allows them to exercise control over their systems of rewards and punishments, both here on earth and in the afterlife.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“It is time to accept that most of our heroes were not, are not, heroes. They were just good actors selected by the cult, due to bloodlines, or secret society membership.”
― Jack Freestone

“But killing the possibility of debate is what kills the faith. The debate keeps the conversation at the center of the community. Ending the debate, getting to the right answer, is not the prime directive in the spiritual life. You can tussle with each other and with God (and win!), and it’s all good. The back-and-forth with the Bible is where God is found. Enter the dialogue and you find God waiting for you, laughing with delight, ready to be a part of that back-and-forth.”
― Peter Enns, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It

“Neither of us cares a straw for popularity. A proof of this is, for example, that because of aversion to any personality cult, I have never permitted the numerous expressions of appreciation from various countries with which I was pestered during the existence of the International to reach the realm of publicity, and have never answered them, except occasionally by a rebuke. When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes.”
― Karl Marx

“Every day of our lives has been an April Fool’s Day. We just never knew it until Covid.”
― Jack Freestone

“The object remaining a secret in the hands of the managers, the rest simply put a ring in their own noses, by which they may be led about at pleasure; and still panting after the secret, they are the better pleased the less they see of their way. A mystical object enables the leader to shift his ground as he pleases, and to accommodate himself to every current fashion or prejudice. This again gives him almost unlimited power; for he can make use of these prejudices to lead men by troops. He finds them already associated by their prejudices, and waiting for a leader to concentrate their strength and set them in motion.”
― Milton William Cooper, Behold a Pale Horse