Quotes About Persecution

Persecution is as necessary to religion as pruning to an orchard.

ISIS goes after any group that deviates from its extreme ideology, dissident Muslims, for example, or the Yazidis who practice an ancient religion distinct from both Islam and Christianity.

Since the whole affair had become one of religion, the vanquished were of course exterminated.

It's not a weapon, [governments] don't kill, they don't conduct massacres, although massacres have been committed and many people were killed, but they stifle religion, they're afraid probably.

Saints are usually killed by their own people.

Not being allowed to persecute someone else in the name of your religion does NOT equate to religious persecution.

The greatest threat to religion in any society is not persecution, but rather apathy born of irrelevance.

Do you have to pay to be Jewish? Do you need a licence?

I have no objection to any man coming here, but I will have nothing to do with men who will abuse me at midnight and at noon day. Our difficulties and persecutions have always arisen from men right in our midst.

Why was Joseph Smith persecuted? Why was he hunted from neighborhood to neighborhood, from city to city, and from State to State, and at last suffered death? Because he received revelations from the Father, from the Son, and was ministered to by holy angels, and published to the world the direct will of the Lord concerning his children on the earth.

The worst fear that I have about this people is that they will get rich in this country, forget God and his people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty and all manner of persecution, and be true. My greater fear for them is that they cannot stand wealth; and yet they have to be tried with riches, for they will become the richest people on this earth.

Since I embraced the Gospel, with many of my brethren, I have been broken up and compelled to leave my home five times, yet we live as a people, and are as comfortable and as well off as our neighbors who do not belong to the Church; and I do not know that our enemies hate us any more than they hate each other.

Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.

More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.

si sumamos todas las víctimas de todas estas persecuciones, resulta que en esos tres siglos los politeístas romanos mataron a no más que unos pocos miles de cristianos.1 Por el contrario, a lo largo de los siguientes 1.500 años, los cristianos masacraron a millones de correligionarios para defender interpretaciones ligeramente distintas de la religión del amor y la compasión.

On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God's love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours.

This is the God of the Crusaders and jihadists, of the inquisitors, misogynists, and homophobes. This is the God we talk about when we stand around a burning pyre, hurling stones and abuses at the heretics being grilled there.

the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.

Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes 'heretics' and 'infidels'.

In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.

Of all the high-ranking Christian leaders across Nazi-occupied Europe, Bishop Damaskinos of Greece was the only one who publicly stood up to denounce the Nazis' deportation of Jews.

This formulation rendered Judaism more than just a competing religion. It became a source of evil.

Antisemitism is not the hatred of people who happen to be Jews. It is hatred of them because they are Jews.

Burning the witch Giordano Bruno is one more wound inflicted on Christ's body.