Inquisition Quotes - Page 3

• It is interesting that liberals don't mind a strong faith at all. When it's their guy with a strong faith - whether it's Jimmy Carter or Woodrow Wilson or Harry Truman - that's just great. FDR inscribing Bibles and sending them to the troops. God bless him! But when a Republican president cites Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher, as George W. Bush did on a famous occasion, then, well, the liberals cry out that [Tomás de] Torquemada is on the loose and warn gravely of the coming Inquisition.

  Paul Kengor

  Strong, Jesus, Interesting

  Source: www.christianpost.com

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• Non-believers in the greenhouse scenario are in the position of those long ago who doubted the existence of God ... fortunately for them, the Inquisition is no longer with us!

  Marcel Leroux

  Long Ago, Global Warming, Existence

  Marcel Leroux (2006). “Global Warming - Myth or Reality?: The Erring Ways of Climatology”, p.4, Springer Science & Business Media

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• Where there is no danger of overt action there is rarely any interference with freedom. That is why there has so often been amazing freedom of opinion within an aristocratic class which at the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppression of heterodox opinion among the common people. When the Inquisition was operating most effectively against the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, the princes of the Church and the nobles enjoyed the freedom of the Renaissance.

  Walter Lippmann

  Class, People, Church

  Walter Lippmann (2003). “Men of Destiny (Ppr)”, p.99, Transaction Publishers

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• There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.

  Walter Lippmann

  Thinking, Self, Ideas

  Walter Lippmann (1914). “A Preface to Politics”

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• If this is how science operates, by silencing those who express opposing views rather than by debating with them, then science is dead and we are in a new era of the Inquisition.

  Graham Hancock

  Views, Eras, New Era

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• Being interviewed is one of the most abnormal things that you can do to somebody else. It's two steps removed from the Inquisition.

  Frank Zappa

  Two, Abnormal, Steps

  Interview on Channel 4, June 1, 1983.

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• If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, [then and only then will truth]prevail over fanaticism.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Law, Practice, Public Opinion

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• I would love to make some kind of film about the witches and the Inquisitions. That would be really fun because I don't think their stories have been told enough.

  Amy Smart

  Fun, Thinking, Would Be

  "Interview: Amy Smart" by Vicki Hogarth, www.askmen.com.

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• People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.

  Thornton Wilder

  Country, Spring, Eye

  Thornton Wilder (2014). “The Bridge of San Luis Rey: A Novel”, p.9, Harper Collins

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• Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.

  Thomas Szasz

  Vocabulary, Expectations, Political

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1997). “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement”, p.27, Syracuse University Press

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• The world is but a school of inquisition; it is not who shall enter the ring, but who shall run the best courses.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Running, School, World

  Michel de Montaigne (2015). “Montaigne's Essays: Top Essays”, p.952, 谷月社

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• All events are linked together in the best of possible worlds; after all, if you had not been driven from a fine castle by being kicked in the backside for love of Miss Cunegonde, if you hadn't been sent before the Inquisition, if you hadn't traveled across America on foot, if you hadn't given a good sword thrust to the baron, if you hadn't lost all your sheep from the good land of Eldorado, you wouldn't be sitting here eating candied citron and pistachios. - That is very well put, said Candide, but we must cultivate our garden.

  Voltaire

  Garden, Feet, America

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• It was a perfectly normal gerbil. It appeared to be living in an exciting construction of cylinders, spheres and treadmills, such as the Spanish Inquisition would have devised if they'd had access to a plastics molding press.

  Neil Gaiman

  Perfectly Normal, Spheres, Cylinders

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• Anyway, my office is small - one room, but on the corner, with a couple of windows. The sign on the door reads, simply, HARRY DRESDEN, WIZARD. Just inside the door is a table, covered with pamphlets with titles like: Magic and You, and Why Witches Don't Sink Any Faster Than Anyone Else - a Wizard's Perspective. I wrote most of them. I think it's important for we practitioners of the Art to keep up a good public image. Anything to avoid another Inquisition.

  Jim Butcher

  Art, Couple, Thinking

  Jim Butcher (2008). “Grave Peril: Book three of The Dresden Files”, p.19, Penguin

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• Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Children, Men, Evil

  Kurt Vonnegut (2013). “If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young”, p.64, RosettaBooks

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• It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.

  Elie Wiesel

  Book, Historical Novels, Captivity

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• At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.

  Jean Cocteau

  Childhood, Quality, Adults

  Jean Cocteau (1966). “The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles)”, p.23, New Directions Publishing

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• Even when the east excited me most, even when I was keenly aware of its superiority to the broad, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which only spared children and the very old-even then it had always for me a quality of distortion.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Children, Ohio, Quality

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• There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Wall, Army, Hands

  Edgar Allan Poe (2012). “Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poetry and Tales”, p.339, Broadview Press

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• Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.

  Salman Rushdie

  People, Violence, Christianity

  "The Iconoclast". Interview with Shikha Dalmia, reason.org. August 1, 2005.

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• In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual freedom, a battle against the Inquisition, a battle against religious censorship. And the victory of the Enlightenment in Europe was seen as pushing religion away from the center of power. In America, at the same time, the Enlightenment meant coming to a country where people were not going to persecute you by reason of your religion. So it meant a liberation into religion. In Europe, it was liberation out of religion.

  Salman Rushdie

  Country, Religious, America

  "The Iconoclast". Interview with Shikha Dalmia, reason.org. August 1, 2005.

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• I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism…The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.

  Saul Alinsky

  Religious, Political, Independence

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• The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Secret, Literature, Slavery

  Harriet Ann Jacobs (1861). “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”, p.55

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• I believe that one day the world will judge the witch hunt against homosexuals just as harshly as it judges the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust.

  Mae West

  Believe, Judging, Holocaust

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• I believe that the formation of the Chekas was one of the gravest and most impermissible errors that the Bolshevik leaders committed in 1918 when plots, blockades, and interventions made them lose their heads. All evidence indicates that revolutionary tribunals, functioning in the light of day and admitting the right of defence, would have attained the same efficiency with far less abuse and depravity. Was it necessary to revert to the procedures of the Inquisition?

  Victor Serge

  Believe, Errors, Light

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