Quotes About Persecution

Churches thrive on martyrdom and persecution.

Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit

The most important truths always appear first as blasphemies or obscenities. That's why every great innovator is persecuted. And the sacraments look obscene, too, to an outsider. The eucharist is just sublimated cannibalism, to the unawakened. When the Pope kisses the feet of the laity, he looks like an old toe-queen to some people. The rites of Pan look like a suburban orgy.

In Spain, Torquemada personally sent 10,220 persons to the stake. . . . Counting those killed for other heresies, the persecutions were responsible for reducing the population of Spain from twenty million to six million in two hundred years … While the well-known estimate of the total death-toll, from Roman times onward, of nine million is probably somewhat too high, it can safely be said that more persons were put to death than were killed in all the European wars fought up to 1914.

For one thing, they did not call themselves Pilgrims (that term was not widely used until about 1840). Nor were they fleeing immediate persecution.

Alfred Dreyfus had been a scapegoat because he was at once a Jew and a vampire.

I was seized with bitterness, and wept as I went along the street. . . . I cursed the cruel powers, whoever they might be, that persecuted me so, consigned them to hell's damnation and eternal torments for their petty persecution. There was but little chivalry in fate, really little enough chivalry; one was forced to admit that.

My relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.

Some people say that we here have no freedom of religion, ... In reality, the people in that country are the ones who were forced to embrace a religion.

Religious tolerance is something we should all practice; however, there have been more persecution and atrocities committed in the name of religion and religious freedom than anything else.

Religion is the most fragile of all freedoms. And that's because it is the most threatening to those in power.

Cruel persecutions and intolerance are not accidents, but grow out of the very essence of religion, namely, its absolute claims.

When we get through with the Jews in America, they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.

That is good. It is a law of nature. That is the way with all founders of religion. Without persecution superior ideas cannot penetrate into the heart of society.

You must remember that we persecute nobody for religion. We regard religion as an error and fight it with education.

Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law.

While many Islamic countries pay lip service to the idea of freedom of religion, they don't put up with conversion from Islam to another religion.

In proportion to its power, Protestantism has been as persecuting as Catholicism.

Religion which requires persecution to sustain, it is of the devil's propagation.

There is an absolutely fundamental hostility on the part of totalitarian regimes toward religion.

The world would use us just as it did the martyrs, if we loved God as they did.

Far from being an aberration that is not representative of Christianity, the persecution of heretics follows logically from the connection of faith and salvation as presented by Jesus in the Gospels.

Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plan religion.

Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches.