Quotes About Sacrifice

Joseph Heller knew how the need to belong, and the need for security, can make people accept lethal and stupid conditions, and then act as if they had imposed them on themselves.

The sad thing is that so many people, in the belief that the universe is organized to suit and influence them, are willing to sacrifice even the slight cranial capacity with which evolution has equipped us.

It is supposed to be an axiom of Western civilization that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as order.

I feel upsettingly denatured. If Penélope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice. In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice.

An antique saying has it that a man's life is incomplete unless or until he has tasted love, poverty, and war.

You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you." Unconscious of the account to which this irony might be charged, she then told of the sufferer's reply: "Then please tell him to stop kissing me.

Within this quadrilateral of forces, Jefferson was to emerge as the republican equivalent of a philosopher king, who was coldly willing to sacrifice all principles and all allegiances to the one great aim of making America permanent.

The curse of Abraham continues to poison Hebron, but the religious warrant for blood sacrifice poisons our entire civilization.

From Alan Lightman's intricate 1993 novel Einstein's Dreams; set in Berne in 1905: With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts… and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own… Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

Yet in our hands and within our view is a whole universe of discovery and clarification, which is a pleasure to study in itself, gives the average person access to insights that not even Darwin or Einstein possessed, and offers the promise of near-miraculous advances in healing, in energy, and in peaceful exchange between different cultures. Yet millions of people in all societies still prefer the myths of the cave and the tribe and the blood sacrifice.

To accept the spread of cervical cancer in the name of god is no different, morally or intellectually, from sacrificing these women on a stone alter and thanking the deity for giving us the sexual impulse and then condemning it.

The latter, which honors Abraham's willingness to make a human sacrifice of his son, is common to all three monotheisms, and descends from their primitive ancestors.

he was praised from the clouds for showing his sturdy willingness to murder an innocent in expiation of his own crimes.

the tree of liberty must be nurtured by the blood of tyrants, as well as of patriots).

Christopher Hitchens

When you want anything badly, you always have to make some sacrifices.

La cruz es la demostración definitiva del amor de Dios, el amor del Padre y del Hijo.

My teeth were nice commodities, and I did enjoy having kidneys, but I'd give them all away if someone threatened to take my Slayer albums from me.

FAUSTUS. [Stabbing his arm.] Lo, Mephistophilis, for love of thee, I cut mine arm, and with my proper blood Assure my soul to be great Lucifer's, Chief lord and regent of perpetual night!

TAMBURLAINE: Live still, my love, and so conserve my life, Or, dying, be the author of my death.

Break heart, drop blood, and mingle it with tears.

I'le burne my bookes; ah Mephostophilis.

I'm just going to try to save the woman I love, and that's as good as the world to me.

I may be small, but Im not a child to be afraid of a pretended demon speaking in tongues. Im a lapsed Christian and a pagan of convenience. The worst I can do on my conscience is cut your throat and ask the forest to count it as a sacrifice come the Yule, so cease your nonsense and tell me how you know my name.