Quotes About Heretics

All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

The storm howled out of the west like the terrible voice of God, shouting down the heretics who doubted the coming Apocalypse.

Progress isn't achieved by preachers or guardians of morality, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and sceptics

free-associative sexual libel...is typical of the impulses of religious authoritarians to demonize all heretics by attributing to them every manner of outrage that a perverse human mind could imagine.

London, at the same time, Isaac Deutscher distinguished between 'heretics' and 'renegades' (communists who became anti-Stalinist and those who became anti-communist), in a definition that sought not to cast anathemas but rather to describe a psychological attitude and a mental habitus.

The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.

Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception.

The third major rebel against Catholicism was Henry VIII, whose administration burned, on average, 3.25 heretics per year.38

heretics can validly administer all the other Sacraments, with the sole exception of Penance, 30 which cannot, barring cases of urgent necessity, be validly conferred by heretical and schismatic priests;—not on account of their lack of ortho doxy, but because they have no ecclesiastical juris diction.

If you go looking for loonies and religious fanatics and dropouts and freaks, I dare say you'll find it.

All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

Reading and rereading this collection, I encounter the generosity, frailties and strengths, contradictions and contributions of "disappeared" rebels and heretics, of prophets and soldiers and healers. I am reminded of the noncanonical Gnostic Gospels suppressed by state religion; the heart of this work seems to pulse with the Gospel of Thomas (113): The disciples said to Him, "When will the Kingdom come?" [Jesus said,] "It will not come by waiting for it.

Canonical books. The heretics at the beginning of the Church serve to prove the canonical books.

When would-be reformers arise, they are rejected as heretics, turncoats, troublemakers, disturbers of the peace, traitors, and enemies.

if that's true, might we, far from being disloyal heretics, actually have the opportunity to become the evolutionary descendants of Jesus who are called to carry on his radically progressive vision in our brief time on this earth?

The very first [Franciscan friars] to cross the Alps knew no German and lacked an interpreter. The brothers discovered that the word 'ja' usually had good results, but when they used it in reply to the question whether they were heretics, they ran into trouble. The next group had an interpreter.

We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present-your future-a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty-the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simpl...truth that earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalistic illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day...

Why not? You and I are eccentrics. We're certainly not typical of the people living on Terminus. As for criminals, that's a matter of definition. And if criminals are the price we must pay for rebels, heretics, and geniuses, I'm willing to pay it. I demand the price be paid.

Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics.

The Church which taught men not to keep faith with heretics, had no claim to toleration.

Will you tell me, William, you who know so much about heretics that you seem one of them, where the truth lies? Nowhere, at times, William said, sadly. You see? You yourself can no longer distinguish between one heretic and another. I at least have a rule. I know that heretics are those who endanger the order that sustains the people of God. And I defend the empire because it guarantees this order for me.

The biggest danger to the European Union comes not from those who advocate change, but from those who denounce new thinking as heresy. In its long history Europe has experience of heretics who turned out to have a point.

In Europe it was once commonly believed that beasts could be possessed by demons and controlled by the evil of Satan. So animals, even birds and insects, were tried by ecclesiastical courts, just like witches and heretics. They were excommunicated, tortured and condemned to death.

Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.