Quotes About Heretics

Before I met the Jesuits, I'd never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.

When change is bumpy and messy, particularly if it impels others to change, it is viewed with suspicion and rancor usually reserved for the worst heretics.

I have always been on the side of the heretics, against those who burned them, because the heretics so often turned out to be right....Dead, but right.

Government itself, which is the most unnatural and necessary of social mechanisms, has usually required the support of piety and the priest, as clever heretics like Napoleon and Mussolini soon discovered; and hence "a tendency to theocracy is incidental to all constitutions.

Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late 20th century: go to the ends of the earth to search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you will find that they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London.

All political movements are like this -- we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

Tolerance of diverse views and of heretics fosters innovation, whereas a strongly traditional outlook (as in China's emphasis on ancient Chinese classics) stifles it.

There's a new kind of quasi-religious discourse forming, with its own followers, its creed, its orthodoxy, its heretics, its priests, its literature, its eschatological framework. Even its own Singularity. It's AI.

Among the gods, there is a dispute as to which one of them originally thought of Christianity; or, as they call it, the Great Leg Pull. Apollo has the best claim, but a sizeable minority support Pluto, ex-God of the Dead, on the grounds that he has a really sick sense of humour. How would it be, suggested the unidentified god, if first we tell them all to love their neighbour, pack in the killing and thieving, and be nice to each other. Then we let them start burning heretics.

Whenever the true message of the cross is abolished, the anger of hypocrites and heretics eases and all things seem to be at peace.

I am one of the heretics who believes that art must be enjoyed first and analyzed later.

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")

Ne pourrait?on pas dire que toutes les religions du monde ne sont que des sectes de la religion naturelle, et que les juifs, les chrétiens, les musulmans, les païens même ne sont que des naturalistes hérétiques et schismatiques ?

Heretics are the only ones worth trusting,' the voice said, 'for they have everything to gain and everything to lose.

The short life of Jesus can hardly compare with the suffering of brave heretics who have been persecuted for criticizing Christianity, or with the agony of the "witches" who were burned, drowned and hanged by bible believers (quoting Exodus 22:18: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"). Nor

The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can't cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics.

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy...

We must read the Fathers cautiously, and lay them in the gold balance, for they often stumbled and went astray, and mingled in their books many monkish things. Augustine had more work and labor, to wind himself out of the Father's writings, then he had with the heretics.

For when the heart is evil, all its works are evil, no matter how splendid they are. [And here it is clear that God is speaking, because He judges their hearts.] 1 And this word aptly and clearly expresses the nature of hypocrisy, which is a righteous performance in the eyes of men on earth, but is evil in the heart. Such are all heretics, all pretenders who create an appearance in public to which their heart does not correspond.

That is the way of it among heretics. They start questioning one doctrine and end up questioning everything. No wonder they used to burn them.

But as the Everglades continued to wither, a few of their colleagues began to wonder if conservation really should mean development more than preservation. These heretics did not believe that God had created man in order to 'improve' or 'redeem' nature; they found God's grace in nature itself.

One might even state it as an axiom: when the church leaves out bits of its core teaching, heretics will pick them up, turn them into something new, and use them to spread doubt and unbelief.

There is always with us that odd little sect of heretics which believes that the stars are busy with the little business of our lives.

Again and again pantheists have arisen from within all three religions, sometimes disguising their views carefully enough to avoid persecution - sometimes being condemned as heretics.