Top 95 Quotes About Heretics
#1. [H]as it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?
[1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor' (Columbia University / The New York Times, December 12, 1991)]
Salman Rushdie
#2. I myself have read the writings and teachings of the heretics, polluting my soul for a while with their abominable notions, though deriving this benefit: I was able to refute them for myself and loathe them even more.
Eusebius
#3. The third major rebel against Catholicism was Henry VIII, whose administration burned, on average, 3.25 heretics per year.38
Steven Pinker
#4. Heretics think false things about God and call it their faith.
Saint Augustine
#5. We wanted to raise a generation of heretics, but instead we raised a generation of ignoramuses
Berl Katznelson
#6. To Arab Sunni Islamists, Iranians are gabrs (Zoroastrians) while Shi'ites, including Arab ones, are rafidis (heretics) who must be "re-converted" or put to death.
Amir Taheri
#7. I, Henricus Kramer Institoris, Judge named on behalf of the faith, declare and pronounce sentence that you standing here are impenitent heretics, and as such are to be delivered to justice,
Jeaniene Frost
#8. Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people.
G. M. Trevelyan
#9. A soldier of fortune with twisted tongue will come to pillage the sanctuary of the gods; To the heretics he will open the gate, thus stirring up the Church militant.
Nostradamus
#10. A disciple was one day recalling how Buddha , Jesus , Mohammed were branded as rebels and heretics by their contemporaries. Said the Master, Nobody can be said to have attained the pinnacle of Truth until a thousand sincere people have denounced him for blasphemy .
Anthony De Mello
#11. True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#12. Hence from all we have hitherto said, it is clear beloved Catholics that we cannot approve the opinions which some [Protestants, Jews, and other heretics] comprise under the head of Americanism [freedom].
Pope Leo XIII
#13. I can understand why Christians call us heretics. But most important, who will God call a heretic? From God's point of view, my revelation is deeply orthodox.
Sun Myung Moon
#14. Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe.
Albert Einstein
#15. For what I was to see at the abbey would make me think that it is often inquisitors who create heretics.
Umberto Eco
#16. He was a living example of the truth that a man may be large-minded and yet strong; that he may hate error, yet love the erring - stand like a rock against heresy, yet be full of compassion for heretics.
F.A. Forbes
#17. The biggest danger to the European Union comes not from those who advocate change, but from those who denounce new thinking as heresy. In its long history Europe has experience of heretics who turned out to have a point.
David Cameron
#18. It was a very stupid mistake to think you could deal with heresy by burning heretics. It's the very same mistake that modernist Catholics are making today in reverse. They think you can love heretics by loving heresies.
Peter Kreeft
#19. Heretics are wicked, but they're mighty int'resting. It's jest that they've got sorter lost looking for God, being under the impression that He's hard to find - which He ain't never.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
#20. Without a confession of faith the church's evaluation of its ministers is haphazard and shallow at best; and the church will be in great danger of laying hands on novices and heretics, all because it does not measure candidates for the ministry by a broad and deep standard.
Samuel E. Waldron
#21. Heretics cannot themselves appear good unless they depict the Church as evil, false, and mendacious. They alone wish to be esteemed as the good, but the Church must be made to appear evil in every respect.
Martin Luther
#22. But this is what leads the heretics astray: that they look upon nature and person as the same thing
John Damascene
#23. 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.
N. T. Wright
#25. If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#27. I am one of the heretics who believes that art must be enjoyed first and analyzed later.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
#28. The ameliorating march of the last few centuries has been initiated by the heretics of each age, though I concede that the men and women denounced and persecuted as infidels by the pious of one century are frequently claimed as saints by the pious of a later generation.
Charles Bradlaugh
#29. I find that the whole weight of relieving human misery and distress falls on the shoulders of those Heretics and Infidels; and though great part of this distress has been occasioned by those ravening wolves' hopeful converts.
Anne Royall
#30. For this reason the bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow. That
Hermann Hesse
#31. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. ("Tomorrow")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#32. 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.
William Dalrymple
#33. 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.
Michael Grunwald
#34. The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.
G.K. Chesterton
#35. The only good thing that we owe to Plato and Aristotle is that they brought forward many arguments which we can use against the heretics. Yet they and other philosophers are now in hell.
Girolamo Savonarola
#36. In Europe it was once commonly believed that beasts could be possessed by demons and controlled by the evil of Satan. So animals, even birds and insects, were tried by ecclesiastical courts, just like witches and heretics. They were excommunicated, tortured and condemned to death.
Chet Williamson
#37. By heart we believe and by mouth confess the one Church, not of heretics but the Holy Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church outside which we believe that no one is saved.
Pope Innocent III
#38. Xaphen swore an oath never to fail his primarch.
Argal Tal did not. He spoke in a voice soft enough to break hearts, "We are heretics, father.
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
#39. Heretics are not to be disputed with, but to be condemned unheard, and whilst they perish by fire, the faithful ought to pursue the evil to its source, and bathe their heads in the blood of the Catholic bishops, and of the Pope, who is the devil in disguise.
Martin Luther
#40. 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.
Pat Conroy
#41. Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#42. Successful heretics create their own religions ... You can recognize the need for faith in your idea, you can find the tribe you need to support you, and yes, you can create a new religion around your faith. Steve Jobs did it on purpose at Apple and Phil Knight is famous for doing it at Nike.
Seth Godin
#43. The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach.
Aleister Crowley
#44. Piety is different from superstition. To carry piety to the extent of superstition is to destroy it. The heretics reproach us with this superstitious submission. It is doing what they reproach us with.
Blaise Pascal
#45. 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.
Michael Flynn
#46. Poor heretics there be,
Which think to establish dangerous constancy,
But I have told them, 'Since you will be true,
You shall be true to them, who are false to you.
John Donne
#47. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas).
Sam Harris
#48. In 1487 alone, two hundred heretics had-in one of the greatest euphemisms in the history of language-"relaxed," that is, burned at the stake.
Dogs of God, Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors
James Reston Jr.
#49. Heretics are the new leaders. The ones who challenge the status quo, who get out in front of their tribes, who create movements.
Seth Godin
#50. Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches.
Sam Harris
#51. "If any man thirst, let him come and drink from the rivers of living water" (cf. John 7:38). Where shall he who thirsts come? To heretics where the fountain and river of water is in no way life-giving? Or to the Church, which is One?
Cyprian
#52. The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#53. Books of apostates, heretics, schismatics, and all other writers defending heresy or schism or in any attacking the foundations of religion, are altogether prohibited.
Pope Leo XIII
#54. All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.
John Shelby Spong
#55. The universities only ought to turn out men who are experts in the Holy Scriptures, men who can become bishops and priests, and stand in the front line against heretics, the devil, and all the world. But where do you find that?
Martin Luther
#56. The outlaw, the revolutionary, the cabbalist or member of a secret society, indeed heretics of all kinds are of a highly associative if not sociable disposition, and a certain element of play is prominent in all their doings.
Johan Huizinga
#57. Wicked sons do not have the Holy Ghost in the same way as do beloved sons, and yet they do have Baptism. So, too, heretics do not have the Church as Catholics have, even though they have Baptism.
Saint Augustine
#58. If we are to reach certainty and true autonomy of realization, we need to be willing to be heretics. What's more, we need to become universal heretics, not believing anything that we do not know from direct experience, beyond stories, beyond hearsay, and even beyond the mind.
A.H. Almaas
#59. Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.
("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#60. 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.
Will Durant
#61. The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.
Hermann Hesse
#62. The Middle Ages burned its heretics and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs.
Harold Innis
#63. Heretics were most often bitterly persecuted for the their least deviation from accepted belief. It was precisely their obstinacy about trifles that irritated the righteous to madness.
Lev Shestov
#64. The real difference between Francis and Dominic, which is no discredit to either of them, is that Dominic did happen to be confronted with a huge campaign for the conversion of heretics, while Francis had only the more subtle task of the conversion of human beings.
G.K. Chesterton
#65. In every age the church is threatened by heresy, and heresy is bound up in false doctrine. It is the desire of all heretics to minimize the importance of doctrine. When doctrine is minimized, heresy can exercise itself without restraint.
R.C. Sproul
#66. Without bigots, eccentrics, cranks and heretics the world would not progress.
Gelett Burgess
#67. Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.
Learned Hand
#68. All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.
Yip Harburg
#69. As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism.
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
#70. The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals.
Jacques Barzun
#71. When the Church obtained the direction of the civil power, she soon modified or abandoned the tolerant maxims she had formerly inculcated; and, in the course of a few years, restrictive laws were enacted, both against the Jews and against the heretics.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
#72. For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair" ... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?
Salman Rushdie
#73. The declared enemies of God and His Church, heretics and schismatics, must be criticized as much as possible, as long as truth is not denied. It is a work of charity to shout: 'Here is the wolf!' when it enters the flock or anywhere else.
Saint Francis De Sales
#74. Whoever shall now contend that it is unjust to put heretics and blasphemers to death will knowingly and willingly incur their very guilt.
John Calvin
#75. I'm screwed," Eric repeats, and shakes his head. "I have to go. Take care of her, okay?"
He gives Delia to me as if she were a jewel to be smuggled, a prayer to be whispered between heretics. A pawn. Eric is halfway across the parking lot by the time I answer. "I always do," I say.
Jodi Picoult
#76. When would-be reformers arise, they are rejected as heretics, turncoats, troublemakers, disturbers of the peace, traitors, and enemies.
Brian D. McLaren
#77. Far from being an aberration that is not representative of Christianity, the persecution of heretics follows logically from the connection of faith and salvation as presented by Jesus in the Gospels.
Shadia Drury
#78. The Church which taught men not to keep faith with heretics, had no claim to toleration.
John Locke
#79. Religious men are and must be heretics now- for we must not pray, except in a "form" of words, made beforehand- or think of God but with a prearranged idea.
Florence Nightingale
#80. There is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical opinions ... The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy.
John Stuart Mill
#81. Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are - there we are in the Golden Future.
Aldous Huxley
#82. Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hatred.
Bertrand Russell
#83. The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.
Steven Pinker
#84. I don't complain of conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#85. 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.
Edward R. Murrow
#86. 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.
John Brunner
#87. Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes 'heretics' and 'infidels'.
Yuval Noah Harari
#88. It's very worrying at this time in the world that any point of view should be prohibited, that's banned, there are heretics that should be burned at the stake.
Thabo Mbeki
#89. But we have to get our thrills somewhere. Some men have a weakness for fast women. I have a soft spot for eighty-year-old heretics who buy me pancakes and root beer.
Philip Gulley
#90. Consequently, heretics and schismatics, separated from the unity of this Body, are able to receive the same Sacrament, but with no benefit to themselves; indeed, more to their own harm, in that they are judged the more severely rather than being liberated.
Saint Augustine
#91. For some dark reason you heretics come in droves to this House of God. Its light attracts you, but you are incapable of recognizing that.
Javier Sierra
#92. Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.
G.K. Chesterton
#93. Isn't it strange how silence, in a way, has a sound of its own?
Greg Gifune
#94. Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#95. This history has for so long lived like a spider in my breast. The spider spins and spins, catching memories in its web, threatening to devour every final happiness. With this letter I hope to sweep away the terror and the sadness and to have my heart made pure again by God's grace.
Kathleen Kent
