Quotes About Persecution

Yes, they are hounding me.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

The point of asylum is not to declare to the world what country you think is the pinnacle of civilization. The point of asylum is to find a country that's both willing and able to protect you from political persecution. In no way is asylum an endorsement of a country's politics, laws, or values.

Preach or proselytize for Christianity in much of the Islamic world, and you are a candidate for martyrdom. Practice freedom of speech in Xi Jinping's China, and you can wind up in a cell.

If you look at it, the history of comedy has always been strongest among the nations who have been persecuted the most.

I was the most important person of the world, and people like the Pope would be just like enemies, who would try to put me down in some way or another, or the president. People are always selling the idea that people who have mental illness are suffering.

The only thing I oppose is persecuting of Eastern Orthodox priests and temples.

The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution.

The testimony of anti-communist dissidents is clear: Only in solidarity with others can we find the spiritual and communal strength to resist. The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution. We must see in our brothers and sisters not a burden of obligation but the blessing of our own freedom from loneliness, suspicion, and defeat.

A time of painful testing, even persecution, is coming. Lukewarm or shallow Christians will not come through with their faith intact. Christians today must dig deep into the Bible and church tradition and teach themselves how and why today's post-Christian world, with its self-centeredness, its quest for happiness and rejection of sacred order and transcendent values, is a rival religion to authentic Christianity.

The days to come are going to force American Christians to confront personal suffering for the faith in ways most never have done before (African American Christians are the obvious exception). Besides, it cannot be emphasized strongly enough: the old totalitarianism conquered societies through fear of pain; the new one will conquer primarily through manipulating people's love of pleasure and fear of discomfort.

To be a Baptist in Soviet Russia was to know that you were a permanent outsider. They endured it because they knew that truth was embodied in Jesus Christ, and that to live apart from him would mean living a lie. For the Baptists, to compromise with lies for the sake of a peaceful life is to bend at the knee to death.

We will know when we act—or fail to act—as Christians when to be faithful costs us something. It may be a small thing at first—a place on a sports team because we won't play on Sunday mornings, or the respect of our peers when we will not march in a parade for a political cause. But the demands made on us will grow greater, and the consequences for failing to submit to the world's demands will grow more severe.

Nothing was real about life under communism. The state's control was total. What led Popkov to seek fellowship with Christians was reading The Stranger, the celebrated 1942 novel by Albert Camus, the French existentialist. Though Camus was an atheist, the novel compelled the young Russian living in an atheist state to look for Christ.

Others may have been burnt alive.

Once again Jesus offers hope. The Holy Spirit gives strength to endure the unreasonable hatred and evil in our world and the hostility many have toward Christ. This is especially comforting for those facing persecution.

Never be picky and choosy about means of escaping disembowelment, or waste your time trying to find reasons for the persecution you're a victim of. Escape is good enough for the wise.

In attempting to wipe out the Huguenots, the French created instead a pocket in their own country that was all but impossible to wipe out.

Fundamentally, suspicion, enjoyment of persecution, and even hatred of the entire human race are all much less lethal than a love of humanity, which reeks of ancient rivers of blood. In my view, gratuitous hatred is less bad than gratuitous love.

Literature, the ultimate gift for expressing the most subtle aspects of man's thought and feeling, may not survive persecution: first by religion, then by the bourgeoisie, then by Marxism, and now by commercialism. The

At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.

Great scientists and mathematicians were sent to the guillotine, too, on the grounds that the republic "does not need scientists."52

Within the House of Islam, the penalty for learning too much about the world—so as to call the tenets of the faith into question—is death.

Jews have lived side by side with Christians for nearly two millennia, fathered their religion, and for reasons that are no more substantial than those underlying the belief in the Resurrection have been the objects of murderous intolerance since the first centuries after Christ.