Inquisition Quotes - Page 4

• Science built the Academy, superstition the Inquisition.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Superstitions, Academy, Built

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1898). “Lectures of Col. R.G. Ingersoll: Including His Letters on the Chinese God--Is Suicide a Sin?--The Right to One's Life--etc. Etc. Etc”

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• When I hear from people that religion doesn't hurt anything, I say really? Well besides wars, the crusades, the inquisitions, 9-11, ethnic cleansing, the suppression of women, the suppression of homosexuals, fatwas, honor killings, suicide bombings, arranged marriages to minors, human sacrifice, burning witches, and systematic sex with children, I have a few little quibbles. And I forgot blowing up girl schools in Afghanistan.

  Bill Maher

  Girl, Suicide, Hurt

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• The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in the form of a Copernican revolution or a Darwinian theory of natural selection, were not mischievous men but misinformed men. And so Christ's words from the cross are written in sharp-edged terms across some of the most inexpressible tragedies of history: 'They know not what they do'.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Christian, Science, Men

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• And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

  Barack Obama

  Country, Horse, Home

  Barack Obama's Speech at National Prayer Breakfast, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. February 5, 2015.

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• War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?

  Guy de Maupassant

  Peace, Real, War

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• Throughout all the pain of enslavement and despotism, of inquisition, forced conversion, and massacre, the Jewish people has carried in its heart the yearning for freedom and has given this craving a folk expression which includes every soul in Israel, every single downtrodden pauperized soul!

  Berl Katznelson

  Pain, Heart, Israel

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• Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Condolences, Exquisite

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1878). “The Gates Ajar”

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• All laws for the purpose of making man worship God, are born of the same spirit that kindled the fires of the auto da fe, and lovingly built the dungeons of the Inquisition. All laws defining and punishing blasphemy - making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the Bible, or to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, or to enjoy yourself on the Sabbath, or to give your opinion of Jehovah, were passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once repealed by honest men. An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Ignorance, Men, Law

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.312, Library of Alexandria

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• When a man is in love, jealous, and just whipped by the Inquisition, he is no longer himself.

  Voltaire

  Jealous, Men, Jealous Love

  Elizabeth Cooney Leister, Voltaire (1985). “Voltaire's Candide”, Barrons Educational Series Incorporated

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• After the survivor of the Spanish conquest has told his life's story he is convicted by the Inquisition: He posted no brief in defense or mitigation of his offenses, and when he was most solemnly advised by the Court President of the dire consequences he faced if found guilty, Juan Damasceno volunteered only one comment: "It will mean I do not go to the Christian heaven?" He was told that that would indeed be the worst of his punishments: that he would most assuredly not go to Heaven. At which, his smile sent a thrill of horror through every soul of the Court.

  Gary Jennings

  Christian, Mean, Punishment

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• I appeal to the contemptible speech made lately by Sir Robert Peel to an applauding House of Commons. 'Orders of merit,' said he, 'were the proper rewards of the military' (the desolators of the world in all ages). 'Men of science are better left to the applause of their own hearts.' Most learned Legislator! Most liberal cotton-spinner! Was your title the proper reward of military prowess? Pity you hold not the dungeon-keys of an English Inquisition! Perhaps Science, like creeds, would flourish best under a little persecution.

  John Joseph Griffin

  Military, Heart, Science

  John Joseph Griffin (1834). “Chemical Recreations: A Series of Amusing and Instructive Experiments, which May be Performed with Ease, Safety, Success, and Economy ; to which is Added, The Romance of Chemistry : an Inquiry Into the Fallacies of the Prevailing Theory of Chemistry : with a New Theory and a New Nomenclature”, p.232

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• The investigation of consciousness has come to be regarded suspiciously by most smart people and by most scientists. That's a legacy that began with the Inquisition, which considered non-Christian spiritual inquiry as blasphemous.

  David O. Russell

  Christian, Spiritual, Smart

  Source: www.ericspitznagel.com

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• The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.

  Maurice Maeterlinck

  Numbers, People, Progress

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• If you compare the United States with Europe, my view is that what happened in Europe is that the church became deeply distrusted by people, because it sided with the monarchs. It instituted the Inquisition and became part of the repressive state apparatus. That never happened here. We don't have that history.

  John Rawls

  Views, Europe, People

  John Rawls, Samuel Richard Freeman (1999). “Collected Papers”, p.621, Harvard University Press

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• Whoever attempts to suppress liberty of conscience finishes some day by wishing for the Inquisition.

  Jules Simon

  Wish, Liberty, Conscience

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• In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Morning, Atheist, Commitment

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• I recall that I had a terrible struggle finding anything antireligious in the school libraries.But many years later my family moved into a house where a woman had left a box of books containing 20 volumes on the history of the Inquisition. I found out there was a word for people like me: "heretic." I was kind of delighted to find I had an identity.

  Madalyn Murray O'Hair

  Book, Struggle, School

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• Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages. It's still in the fifteenth century or whatever. And Christianity in the fifteenth century, after all, was full of inquisitions and burnings at the stake, and so on and so on. So give Islam time, and it will reach the point of maturity that other religions have. But Mormonism is much younger than Islam, and it's got there already. So I don't think that's an argument that works.

  Salman Rushdie

  Thinking, Maturity, Giving

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I hope for an America where the power of faith will always burn brightly, but where no modern inquisition of any kind will ever light the fires of fear, coercion, or angry division.

  Edward Kennedy

  Fire, Light, America

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• I am certainly interested in a tribunal in which, for having used my reason, I was deemed little less than a heretic. Who knows but men will reduce me from the profession of a philosopher to that of historian of the Inquisition!

  Galileo Galilei

  Men, Littles, Philosopher

  Letter to Fr. Vincenzo Renieri, 1633.

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• It degrades from the equal rank of Citizens all those whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of the Legislative authority. Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree.

  James Madison

  Religion, Atheism, May

  James Madison, Ralph Ketcham “Selected Writings of James Madison”, Hackett Publishing

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• As to Science, she has never sought to ally herself to civil power. She has never attempted to throw odium or inflict social ruin on any human being. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torture, least of all to death, for the purpose of upholding or promoting her ideas. She presents herself unstained by cruelties and crimes. But in the Vatican-we have only to recall the Inquisition-the hands that are now raised in appeals to the Most Merciful are crimsoned. They have been steeped in blood!

  John William Draper

  Science, Blood, Hands

  John William Draper (1875). “History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science: By John William Draper ...”, p.11, New York, D. Appleton

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• The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin's Russia: it's like blaming Jesus Christ for the Inquisition in Spain.

  Tony Benn

  Jesus, Russia, Spain

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• It appears an extraordinary thing to me, that since there is such a diabolical spirit in the depravity of human nature, as persecution for difference of opinion in religious tenets, there never happened to be any inquisition, any auto da fe, any crusade, among the Pagans.

  Laurence Sterne

  Religious, Differences, Spirit

  Laurence Sterne (1803). “The Works of Laurence Sterne ...: With a Life of the Author, Written by Himself ...”, p.43

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• This was how you wound up in the Inquisition. When you stopped being able to see any difference between Light Ones and Dark Ones. When for you, people weren't even a flock of sheep, but just a handful of spiders in a glass jar. When you stopped believing in the future, and all you wanted to do was preserve the status quo. For yourself. For those few individuals who were still dear to you.

  Sergei Lukyanenko

  Believe, Dark, Differences

  Sergei Lukyanenko (2009). “The Twilight Watch: (Night Watch 3)”, p.344, Random House

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