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Teachers of Wisdom: (from Erasmus of Rotterdam, by Stefan Zweig)
"The tragic side of the humanistic movement, and indeed, the case of its decline, was that, though the ideas which animated it were great, the men who were its prophets proved inadequate."
Fanaticism, the bastard begotten our of brain and power, fancies itself dictator in the realm of thought, so that only what it thinks is acceptable and must be forced upon the whole universe: it thus splits the human community into friends or foes, adherents or opponents, heroes or criminals, believers or heretics; since it recognizes no other system than its own and no other truth than its own, it needs must resort to violence in order to curb and bridle the divine multiplicity of phenomena and to bring everything under one yoke. The forcible curtailment of mental latitude, of freedom of opinions, every kind of inquisition and censorship, of scaffold and stake-these evils were not brought into the world by blind violence, but by rigidly staring fanaticism, that genius of one-sidedness, that hereditary enemy of universality, that capture of a single idea which would shut the whole world up in a cage.
To think in the Erasmic way is to think independently; to act in the Erasmic way is to work for mutual understanding"
