Persecution Quotes - Page 13

• In countries where people have to flee their homes because of persecution and violence, political solutions must be found, peace and tolerance restored, so that refugees can return home. In my experience, going home is the deepest wish of most refugees.

  Angelina Jolie

  Country, Home, People

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• Persecution on racial and religious grounds has absolutely no place in a nation given over to liberty.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  Religious, Atheism, Liberty

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• Compulsion in the literal Sense is maliciously misrepresented, by supposing it authorizes Violences committed against the Truth. The Answer to this; by which it is prov'd, that the literal Sense does in reality authorize the stirring up Persecutions against the Cause of Truth, and that an erroneous Conscience has the same Rights as an enlighten'd Conscience.

  Pierre Bayle

  Reality, Rights, Atheism

  Pierre Bayle, John Kilcullen, Chandran Kukathas (2005). “A philosophical commentary on these words of the Gospel, Luke 14.23: "Compel them to come in, that My house may be full"”, Liberty Fund Inc.

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• In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement.

  Niall Ferguson

  Russia, Class, History

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• When you prevent me from doing anything I want to do, that is persecution; when I prevent you from doing anything you want to do, that is law, order, and morals.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Order, Law, Want

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• The suffering and calamity are, moreover, exceptional. They befall a conspicuous person. They are themselves of some striking kind. They are also, as a rule, unexpected, and contrasted with previous happiness or glory. A tale, for example, of a man slowly worn to death by disease, poverty, little cares, sordid vices, petty persecutions, however piteous or dreadful it might be, would not be tragic in the Shakespearean sense.

  A. C. Bradley

  Men, Suffering, Vices

  A. C. Bradley (2016). “Shakespearean Tragedy”, p.9, A. C. Bradley

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• Fleeing persecution is not a crime. And we do not seek to pander to a noisy, tiny minority who will never embrace modern multicultural Australia. But there are important truths we must face. There is a history and a reality that we cannot ignore. The challenge before us is real, the questions we grapple with as elemental as life and death.

  Bill Shorten

  Real, Australia, Life And Death

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• The apostles suffered incredible persecution and died horrible deaths in the Christian cause. The only possible explanation for their zeal was that they had actually seen, talked with and eaten with the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. If Christ had not really risen and had not appeared to the apostles, would they all have died for a lie?

  Fritz Ridenour

  Christian, Jesus, Lying

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• He held to the idea that the Jewish people, so often victims of injustice and persecution, should have a state where they could be independent and free. Think good or ill of Arik Sharon, agree or disagree with him, but that calling - a noble one - was plain and unalloyed.

  Ariel Sharon

  Independent, Thinking, Should Have

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• God requireth not a uniformity of religion to be enacted in any civil state; which enforced uniformity (sooner or later) is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants, and of the hypocrisy and destruction of millions of souls.

  Roger Williams

  Jesus, War, Civilization

  Roger Williams, John Cotton, John Murton (1848). “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience Discussed: And Mr. Cotton's Letter Examined and Answered”, p.2

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• Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.... During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.

  James Madison

  Religious, Atheist, Ignorance

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• Despite his persecutions, Mr. [Upton] Sinclair reveals himself in Money Writes! to be an enviable man. Always the thing he desires to believe is the thing he feels he knows to be true.

  Dorothy Parker

  Believe, Writing, Men

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• The sole purpose and effect of it is to exclude persecution and to secure the important right of religious liberty.

  Oliver Ellsworth

  Religious, Important, Atheism

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• From Augustine down, theologians have tried to compel people to accept their special interpretation of the Scripture, and the tortures of the inquisition, the rack, the thumb-screw, the stake, the persecutions of witchcraft, the whipping of naked women through the streets of Boston, banishment, trials of heresy, the halter about Garrison's neck, Lovejoy's death, the branding of Captain Walker, shouts of infidel and atheist, have all been for this purpose.

  Matilda Joslyn Gage

  Atheist, Boston, People

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1979). “History of Woman Suffrage”, Ayer Company Pub

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• Whenever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecution was the result.

  William Edward Hartpole Lecky

  Catholic, Atheism, Elbows

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• Does anyone know... does the Christian persecution complex have an expiration date? Because... uh... you've all been in charge pretty much since... uh... what was that guys name... Constantine. He converted in, what was it, 312 A.D. I'm just saying, enjoy your success.

  Jon Stewart

  Christian, Names, Guy

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• We don't want sympathetic liberals, we want gays to represent gays... I represent the gay street people-the 14-year-old runaway from San Antonio. We have to make up for hundreds of years of persecution. We have to give hope to that poor runaway kid from San Antonio. They go to the bars because churches are hostile. They need hope! They need a piece of the pie!

  Harvey Milk

  Kids, Gay, Years

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• Let me say to you, that many of you will see the time when you will have all the trouble, trial and persecution that you can stand, and plenty of opportunities to show that you are true to God and his work. This Church has before it many close places through which it will have to pass before the work of God is crowned with victory. The time will come when no man nor woman will be able to endure on borrowed light. Each will have to be guided by the light within himself. If you do not have it, how can you stand?

  Heber C. Kimball

  God, Religious, Work

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• Is it not enough that all the world is against us, but we must also be against one another? O happy days of persecution, which drove us together in love, whom the sunshine of liberty and prosperity crumbles into dust by our contentions!

  Richard Baxter

  Sunshine, Dust, Liberty

  Richard Baxter (1817). “The saints' everlasting rest; The divine life; and Dying thoughts; also, A call to the unconverted; and Now or never. Carefully revised”, p.19

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• There have been times I almost got a persecution complex. I felt like people wouldn't let me grow up. They always saw me as a smiling kid or goofy teenager, no matter how much I'd changed.

  Ricky Schroder

  Smile, Growing Up, Teenager

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• The Church has ever proved indestructible. Her persecutors have failed to destroy her; in fact, it was during times of persecution that the Church grew more and more; while the persecutors themselves, and those whom the Church would destroy, are the very ones who came to nothing. . . .Again, errors have assailed her; but in fact, the greater the number of errors that have arisen, the more has the truth been made manifest. . . . Nor has the Church failed before the assaults of demons: for she is like a tower of refuge to all who fight against the Devil.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Fighting, Errors, Numbers

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• Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.

  Rose Macaulay

  Strong, Hate, War

  Rose Macaulay (Dame.) (1940). “And No Man's Wit”

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• In all places, and in all times, those religionists who have believed too much have been more inclined to violence and persecution than those who have believed too little.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Littles, Too Much, Violence

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.447

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• No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Song, Kings, Hatred

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.4

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• The grand reason of the burst of public sentiment in anathemas upon Christ and his disciples, causing his crucifixion, was evidently based upon polygamy, according to the testimony of the philosophers who rose in that age. A belief in the doctrine of a plurality of wives caused the persecution of Jesus and his followers. We might almost think they were 'Mormons.'

  Jedediah M. Grant

  Jesus, Thinking, Wife

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