Quotes About Inquisition

This was interesting knowledge: you could only ask questions in certain rooms. There were rooms for sitting and thinking and rooms for inquisition.

Marcelo took a sharp intake of breath, as if the next question was something he had to swim under.

more men and women were slaughtered in a couple of weeks of the terror of the atheistic French Revolution than in a century of the Inquisition.

That is the way of it among heretics. They start questioning one doctrine and end up questioning everything. No wonder they used to burn them.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise... surprise and fear... fear and surprise... Our two weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency.... Our three weapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope... Our four... no... Amongst our weapons... Amongst our weaponry... are such elements as fear, surprise... I'll come in again.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition...

People sometimes say that ideas cannot be stamped out by force. The Albigensian Crusade proves them wrong. Ideas can be stamped out by the elimination of everyone who holds the ideas. But this is a very costly process. The Inquisition succeeded in the areas where it operated, but did the church immense harm.

Men of learning in Milan have not enjoyed proper respect. They hid themselves in their laboratories and thought themselves lucky if . . . priests left them alone. All is changed today. Thought in Italy is free. Inquisition, intolerance, despots have vanished. I invite scholars to meet and propose what must be done to give science and the arts a new flowering.

People possessed of a lively imagination began to dream that they stood in all kinds of relations to the Evil One. There are cases in which imaginary witches surrendered themselves voluntarily to the Inquisition.

Inquisitor Hugo de Beniols had a number of prominent people burned alive at Toulouse, in 1275, among them Angèle, Lady of Labarthe, a woman of sixty-five years accused of sexual intercourse with Satan.

As a rule the prisoners of the inquisition ask for death as a boon and wherever possible commit suicide; for torture made of every one a hopeless cripple unfit for either work or enjoyment of life, even though he might be released