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Quotes About Inquisition

By its vigilance and by coordinating its efforts throughout the peninsula, it may be argued that the Inquisition checked the seeds of heresy before they could be sown. This view, however, is both naïve and optimistic. At no time in history have governments been able to identify and eliminate security threats before they happen.
~ Henry Kamen
La focalización obsesiva en una cosa terrible llamada «inquisición» nos ha llevado a menudo a evocar a un Godzilla histórico que no coincide con la verdad ni con la realidad.
~ Henry Kamen
In this country, a federal grand jury probe is the closest thing to Courts of Inquisition or a Star Chamber that exists. There are few rights, nothing that comes close to cross-examination, and no right to counsel inside the jury room. There are no real rules of evidence. The only thing they can't do is torture you, and on that you must take the government's word.
~ Steve Martini
It is called Giordano Bruno after the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic scholar who held that there are an infinity of worlds and that many are inhabited. For this and other crimes he was burned at the stake in the year 1600.
~ Carl Sagan
Moors who converted to Christianity were not allowed to take baths, and a damning piece of evidence at the Inquisition, levelled against both Moors and Jews, was that the accused "was known to bathe.
~ Katherine Ashenburg
For, or so they whispered, she would take the camp-stool and draw it up close below the face of the man or woman that hung down over the edge of the interrogation table. Then she would squat down on the stool and and look into the face and quietly say 'No. 1' or 'No. 10' or 'No. 25' and the inquisitors would know what she meant and they would begin. And she would watch the eyes in the face a few inches away from hers and breathe in the screams as if they were perfume.
~ Ian Fleming
Did they scalp you?
~ Steven Gould
During the Inquisition, the renegade monk Giordano Bruno was burned alive at the stake for suggesting that God, in His infinite power, created innumerable worlds.
~ Steven H. Strogatz
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
~ Thomas Hardy
The inquisition of public opinion overwhelms in practice the freedom asserted by the laws in theory.
~ Thomas Jefferson
The Inquisition railed against the Mapuches for their polygamous customs, but overlooked the harems of captive Indian women accompanying the Spaniards: more mestizo children meant more subjects for the crown of Spain and more souls for the Christian religion. From those violent embraces come our peoples, and to this day men act as if they were on horseback surveying the world from on high, giving orders, conquering.
~ Isabel Allende
Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. Even
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War.
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Torquemada seats.
~ Tom Clancy
A public-school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficent achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument for tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the middle ages was combated by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective.' (1923)
~ J. Gresham Machen
When Gordon the Brown, in London in 1997, commissioned a great inquisition or survey of his new realm, the result was the so-called national asset register, which was immediately dubbed by the boomers of the UK Treasury 'the modern Domesday Book.'
~ James Buchan
What destroys it? Is it the Inquisition? Those idiot priests go chasing after innocent women, as if real witches would let themselves be caught and tortured and killed! Almost by definition, anyone who is caught and tortured, and doesn't free themselves by magic, has no magic powers.
~ Neal Stephenson
But this probably saved my father's parents' lives, for, in all the lands controlled by Spain and Portugal, the Inquisition went on a rampage after that. Instead of being roasted alive in some Portuguese auto da fé, my father's parents moved to New Amsterdam and worked for the Dutch West India Company in the slave trade, which was all they knew how to do.
~ Neal Stephenson
pro scienta atque sapienta-Latin- for science and wisdom It's a Darwinian popularity contest. at all times, the question on everyone's mind is, who's coolest? Do you want the Spanish Inquisition in here? you better start acting with a little sobriety, or your mother is going to put two and two together
~ Ned Vizzini
often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics where they do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven to share in it, in their hatred of the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the devil.
~ Umberto Eco
For what I was to see at the abbey would make me think that it is often inquisitors who create heretics.
~ Umberto Eco
It is not the New Inquisition which is our enemy today; it is hereditary Privilege. It is not Superstition, but Big Business which makes use of Superstition as a wolf makes use of sheep's clothing.
~ Upton Sinclair
Every Jew, and every converso, knew that the Inquisition was as much about filling the royal purse as purifying the Spanish church. For payment of a rapacious fine, most prisoners could walk—or hobble, or be borne on a litter, depending on how long they had been held—from the doors of the Casa Santa.
~ Geraldine Brooks
The name of the Vatican body investigating the nuns is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the same body that conducted the Inquisition, which came to be known as the Holocaust of Women because as many as eight million women healers and leaders of pre-Christian Europe were killed by torture and burning at the stake over more than five hundred years.
~ Gloria Steinem