Quotes About Heresy

Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon—and yet they will always survive.

The heresy of heresies was common sense. And

The heresy of heresies was common sense.

Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.

Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

Grandpa Martin Vanderhoff: Penny, why don't you write a play about Ism-Mania? Penny Sycamore: Ism-Mania? Grandpa Martin Vanderhoff: Yeah, sure, you know, Communism, Faschism, Voodoo-ism, everybody's got an -ism these days. Penny Sycamore: Oh [laughs] Penny Sycamore: I thought it was some kind of itch or something. Grandpa Martin Vanderhoff: Well, it's just as catching. When things go a little bad nowadays, you go out, get yourself an -ism and you're in business.

Neither was there any heresy, or diversity of opinion, or disputing about the matter, till the pope had gathered a council to confirm this transubstantiation: wherefore it is most likely that this opinion came up by them of latter days.

A heretic can be tolerated. But a heresy cannot.

In a choice between committing an act of grievous heresy-possibly even an act of evil-and losing my brother, I had chosen to commit heresy. And no matter how much it sickened me, I knew I would make the same choice again.

Heresy lurks when the pastor appeals to and exerts power and authority, when the pastor sees leadership as imposing his will on the congregation. There is but one Lord and one authority: Jesus, the Lamb, the Lord.

Every Christian in every time and place is going to be tempted by certain forms of heresy. I'm sure I'm tempted by my own.

Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.

The greatest blasphemy of the whole ugly process was that the white man ended up making God his partner in the exploitation of the Negro. What greater heresy has religion known? Ethical Christianity vanished and the moral nerve of religion was atrophied. This terrible distortion sullied the essential nature of Christianity.

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. Here

heresy was often perceived by the Church as a financial or political threat rather than merely a theological one.

Indeed, the greatest single innovation of the Spanish Inquisition was to turn heresy from a thought-crime into a blood-crime...

All the weaponry and tactics that have been deployed in the war on terror are justified by precisely the same theological stance once invoked by the war on heresy.

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), a celebrated polymath and an early advocate of the Copernican theory of the universe, on charges of holding erroneous opinions about various aspects of Catholic dogma, including the divinity of Jesus Christ, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the virginity of Mary. Bruno had offered only a halfhearted recantation rather than the abject confession that the Inquisition always demanded, and he was burned alive as an unrepentant heretic.

A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.

In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change or lives.

It is easy to see what is heresy today, but who can tell what will be heresy tomorrow.

I think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of fortitude, or they would not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as they would give advantage to their many enemies; and they have not, like orthodox sinners, such a number of friends to excuse or justify them.

Repression was the favored food of heresy.

All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.