On Fanaticism.

Digging through my attic last night, I found a series of blank books I've filled over the years with excerpts from books I've read. Finding them in times when religious and political extremists are taking charge around the world and at home, they seem to take on new meaning. Another:

Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent. Of those who heat the iron in order to shape it at once. I should prefer to warm man's body and leave him. We might reach this result: mankind retaining this fire through self-combustion. Mankind set free of the trampoline that is the resistance of others, and digging into its own flesh to find a meaning.

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks