Quotes About Persecution

This is appalling. The idea that a person could be punished because of their religious belief and the idea they might be executed is just beyond belief.

Americans are squeamish about anything that seems to punish people for their religious beliefs.

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.

Many instances of persecution and killing have occurred in countries with atrocious human rights records such as Sri Lanka, Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

May 20, 2017, was one of the scariest days of my life. It was the day I realized I was being hunted by Erdogan.

Both Left and Right take pleasure in mildly persecuting those who fail to meet their civic ideals.

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.

First of all, they came to take the gypsies and I was happy because they pilfered. Then they came to take the Jews and I said nothing, because they were unpleasant to me. Then they came to take homosexuals, and I was relieved, because they were annoying me. Then they came to take the Communists, and I said nothing because I was not a Communist. One day they came to take me, and there was nobody left to protest. Bertold Brecht, inspired by Emil Gustav Friedrich Martin Niemöller

Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.

For the first time in modern history, anti-Semitism became governmental policy.

Between 1933 and 1943, just 190,000 Jews were allowed to immigrate into America—a small fraction of the millions seeking asylum.

Inquisition. But

Hobbes: Do you think there's a God? Calvin: Well, somebody's out to get me!

In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people avoided mentioning political persecution - the incarceration and systematic extermination of whole peoples and groups in society. Then, from 1965, this became a preoccupation of writers - not always in an acceptable form.

At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.

I do not write for this generation. I am writing for other ages. If this could read me, they would burn my books, the work of my whole life. On the other hand, the generation which interprets these writings will be an educated generation; they will understand me and say: 'Not all were asleep in the nighttime of our grandparents.'

The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world.

Plato, along with the latest pope, recognised how dangerous it is to have an artist around making mischief, stirring things up with the spoon of truth and intoxicant of fantasy and magic. And so, for crossing the line, and for stealing God's fire, artists were banned, imprisoned, condemned, silenced, killed – they always would be, these sometimes Christs of the page.

Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer without bodyguards can hardly be considered serious. A bad review is the least of our problems.

A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor.

Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone. What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even

It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions. A good many of us might have accepted such a death. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity.

What the Nazis themselves claimed to be their chief discovery—the role of the Jewish people in world politics—and their chief interest—persecution of Jews all over the world—have been regarded by public opinion as a pretext for winning the masses or an interesting device of demagogy.

In the eyes of the Jews, thinking exclusively in terms of their own history, the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler, in which a third of the people perished, appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered.