Quotes About Inquisition

Contemporaries only know the authority figures and the loudmouths. And the people born into power. But it takes perspective to know who's carrying the load. Nobody here has a clue who Johannes Kepler is. All they know about Galileo is that he's a teacher who got in trouble with the Inquisition. I doubt anyone's heard of Francis Bacon. Even in Britain, nobody really knows him. He's just a guy with a funny name.

There are those who say we must rescind the Golan Heights law that was passed in the Knesset. To rescind is a concept from the days of the Inquisition. Our forefathers were burned at the stake and would not rescind their faith.

The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin's Russia: it's like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain.

Legislatures have no right to set up an inquisition and examine into the private opinions of men. Test-laws are useless and ineffectual, unjust and tyrannical.

We're not here to witness anything. We're witch-hunters.

Thomas Mann, a German émigré, said precisely that: "I am painfully familiar with certain political trends, spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged 'state of emergency' … that is how it started in Germany. What followed was fascism and what followed fascism was war.")

He wonders who decided which books were too dangerous to keep, and who it was that had to hunt down and collect the condemned books, like an executioner, ferrying them to their doom. He wonders if it is his father.

And we know that the period during which the influence of Christian theism was strongest, was the period when the intellectual life of civilised man was at its lowest, morality at its weakest, and the general outlook most hopeless. Religious control gave us heresy hunts, and Jew hunts, burnings for witchcraft, and magic in the place of medicine. It gave us the Inquisition and the auto da fé, the fires of Smithfield and the night of St. Bartholomew.

I was questioned for eight hours

If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, then and only then will truth, prevail over fanaticism

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition." —Monty Python's Flying Circus

Who all is in there? Speak up and be quick about it!' 'A Methodist and a son a bitch!

Religion has always persecuted science.

no hay que olvidar que, hace siglos, nuestra religión formó la Inquisición y mató a mujeres y niños inocentes en nombre de Dios. A causa de ello, hemos tenido que pedir perdón al mundo y también a nosotros mismos. Con el tiempo, sin embargo, hemos conseguido que las heridas cicatricen.

Her hair was pulled back so severely, it would have won approval from the Spanish Inquisition as a method of torture.

St. Paul was not personally responsible for the Inquisition and for the Roman Church at the end of the fifteenth century, but the inquirer, whether Christian or not, cannot be content to observe that Christianity was depraved or distorted by the conduct of unworthy popes and bishops; he must rather seek to discover what it was in the Pauline epistles that gave rise, in the fullness of time, to unworthy and criminal actions.

As already noted, Of eighty popes in a line from the thirteenth century on not one of them disapproved of the theology and apparatus of the Inquisition. On the contrary, one after another added his own cruel touches to the workings of this deadly machine.

The popes themselves were the authority behind the Inquisitions. They wielded the power of life and death even over emperors. Had any pope opposed the Inquisition, he could have stopped it during his papacy at least. Where do we read that the popes thundered anathemas against the secular authorities who imposed so many and such gruesome deaths upon their victims? Never! Civil

carried on for centuries in the name of Christ by the command of those who claimed to be the vicars of Christ. They are still honored with that title by this Church, which has never admitted that the Inquisitions were wrong. She has not repented or apologized, and she dares to pose even today as the supreme teacher and example of morals and truth. Remember also that the doctrines which supported the Inquisitions remain in force within the Roman Catholic Church even at the present time.

Pope Innocent VIII made such hysterical nonsense official Catholic dogma in his 1484 Bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus: Men and women straying from the Catholic faith have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi [male and female demonic sexual partners], and by their incantations, spells, conjurations. . .have slain infants yet in the mother's womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth. . . .24

The Modus Operandi When the inquisitors swept into a town an Edict of Faith was issued requiring everyone to reveal any heresy of which they had knowledge. Those who concealed a heretic came under the curse of the Church and the inquisitors' wrath. Informants would approach the inquisitors' lodgings under cover of night and were rewarded for information. No one arrested was ever acquitted.

One would think so, but so far there has been no admission of wrongdoing by Rome even regarding the Inquisition, the mistreatment and massacre of tens of thousands of Jews, the martyrdom of millions of Christians, the slaughter of 1 million Serbs during World War II, and the smuggling of tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals into safe havens.

Where there is no danger of overt action there is rarely any interference with freedom. That is why there has so often been amazing freedom of opinion within an aristocratic class which at the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppression of heterodox opinion among the common people. When the Inquisition was operating most effectively against the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, the princes of the Church and the nobles enjoyed the freedom of the Renaissance.

Deborah trying to make a statement at a press conference was torture so intensely painful that I am quite sure that the men in black hoods who worked for the Inquisition would have shuddered and refused to participate.