Top 100 Quotes About Martyrs
#1. We can always be sure of one thing - that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.
Christopher Hitchens
#2. We will make the lives of the infidels hell - millions of martyrs marching on Jerusalem.
Yasser Arafat
#3. Islamic history is written in two types of ink. Black for the ink of the scholars and red for the blood of the martyrs!
Me
#4. We can't do these things in the force, Mr. Holmes," said he. "No wonder you get results that are beyond us. But some of these days you'll go too far, and you'll find yourself and your friend in trouble." "For England, home and beauty - eh, Watson? Martyrs on the altar of our country.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#5. When we read, we fancy we could be martyrs; when we come to act, we cannot bear a provoking word.
Hannah More
#6. Some ministers would make good martyrs: they are so dry they would burn well.
Charles Spurgeon
#7. Martyrs are needed to create incidents. Incidents are needed to create revolutions. Revolutions are needed to create progress.
Chester Himes
#8. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.
Tertullian
#9. Every hunchback has his gypsy, each phantom his diva, and flames of passion consume witches and martyrs alike. For any lonely monster, tradition demands that one sacrificial soul seek immolation.
Ashe to ashes.
It remains the ultimate, transformative act of love.
Robert Dunbar
#10. There are more martyrs to nonsense than truth, truth preferring missionaries.
Robert Breault
#11. The sad truth is that societies that demand whistleblowers be martyrs often find themselves without either, and always when it matters the most.
Edward Snowden
#12. Education must have two foundations
morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.
Nicolas Chamfort
#13. The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
Alan Furst
#14. Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.
George Eliot
#16. We, who are the living, possess the past. Tomorrow is for our martyrs.
James L. Farmer Jr.
#17. [Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.
John Steinbeck
#18. To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers-- or both.
Elizabeth Charles
#19. Nothing says romance like hobos, martyrs and decapitations.
Craig Ferguson
#20. Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.
Jean Cocteau
#21. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.
Henry David Thoreau
#22. Not all of us are called to die a martyr's death, but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.
Richard Wurmbrand
#23. Liberty is an old fact; it has had its heroes and its martyrs in almost every age. As I look back through the vista of centuries, I can see no end of the ranks of those who have toiled and suffered in its cause, and who wear upon their breasts its stars of the legion of honor.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#24. No true Christian can carry within his heart hatred for any of God's children ... I am as aware as any other Christian that our Savior was Jewish, His mother was Jewish. The Apostles were Jewish. The first martyrs were Jewish ... So no true Christian, in my judgment, can be an anti-Semite.
Pat Buchanan
#25. You think I should be as forgiving as you are? We can't all be saints and martyrs.
Stephenie Meyer
#26. We must all have the spirit of martyrdom, though we may not all die martyrs.
George Whitefield
#27. Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
Annie Dillard
#28. Christ has come into the world to lay out a garden wherein, amid splendor and abundance, there should thrive the violet of humanity, the myrtle of mortification, the rose of love, the lily of virginal souls, the laurel of confessors and the palm of martyrs.
Fr James Groenings
#29. Whether you go your separate ways or stay together, you will continue to witness--against ignorance, against cruelty, and on behalf of all that is beautiful about this strange and crooked world.
Adam Gidwitz
#30. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten
George Orwell
#31. What a trajedy to be a martyr for love, yet we worship the characters anyways because they remind us of how we struggled.
Shannon L. Alder
#32. What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?
John Le Carre
#33. I have been astonished that men could die martyrs
for their religion
I have shuddered at it,
I shudder no more.
I could be martyred for my religion.
Love is my religion
and I could die for that.
I could die for you.
My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet.
John Keats
#34. In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief
Walter Lippmann
#35. We cherish martyrs not because they died for truth, but because they died for what they believed in and loved
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#36. Men have lost their reason in nothing so much as their religion, wherein stones and clouts make martyrs.
Thomas Browne
#37. The Iraqi people are capable of fighting to the victorious end which God wants ... the blood of our martyrs will burn you!
Saddam Hussein
#38. The brave pilot gave his life defending his faith, country and nation and joined other Jordanian martyrs who gave their lives for Jordan.
Abdallah II
#39. But whoso is heroic must find crises to try his edge. Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the trial of persecution always proceeds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#40. A vision is something worth living for, and it is something worth dying for. In fact, if it is not worth dying for, it is not worth living for. Brave, godly martyrs throughout history have proven time and again that what we as Christians live for is worth dying for.
Phil Pringle
#41. That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#45. Islam is not unusual in having a tradition of martyrs. What is unique to Islam is the tradition of murderous martyrdom, in which the individual martyr simultaneously commits suicide and kills others for religious reasons.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#46. Martyrs have been sincere. And so have tyrants. Wise men have been sincere. And so have fools.
E. Haldeman-Julius
#47. Eighty and six years have I served Christ, nor has He ever done me any harm. How, then, could I blaspheme my King who saved Me? ... I bless Thee for deigning me worthy of this day and this hour that I may be among Thy martyrs and drink the cup of my Lord Jesus Christ.
Polycarp
#48. We don't know how God chooses martyrs. We do know that they give us the most precious gift they possess - their very lives.
Cesar Chavez
#49. Here," an old sugar worker told me, "the people have a great love for martyrs
but only after they're dead. Before, there's nothing but complaints.
Eduardo Galeano
#50. Be dead in life, and you will not live in death. Let your soul die strenuously, and not live in weakness. Not only those who suffer death for the sake of faith in Christ are martyrs; but also those who die because of their observance of His commandments.
Isaac Of Nineveh
#51. Hence as the poet says: People in love cannot be moved by kindness, And opposition makes them feel like martyrs.
C.S. Lewis
#52. I do believe that ideas ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs.
Mahatma Gandhi
#53. When the children of God meet, angels also gather to hear the wisdom of God. So it is the duty of every believer, not to praise earthly men or leaders who come and go, but to praise God the Creator and Christ the Savior, who died for us in the cross.
The Voice Of The Martyrs
#54. The oppressed martyrs of our culture have shed blood that nourish the red tulips of our nation.
Mahmud Tarzi
#55. Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,
Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
My heart remembers how!
Robert Louis Stevenson
#58. Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#59. I do not fear death, for death transforms visionaries into martyrs; converts noble ideas into powerful movements.
Dan Brown
#60. Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.
Albert Camus
#61. No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios:
Pebble : Beach
Raindrop : Ocean
Needle : Haystack
Zadie Smith
#62. But the price of freedom is blood, toil and tears. This consolation I have, however, that Africa never forgets. And these martyrs of freedom, these young and budding women, will be remembered and honoured when Africa comes into her own.
Benjamin Pogrund
#63. The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number.
Charles Caleb Colton
#66. Strange, (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, blood, even assassination should so condense - perhaps only really lastingly condense - a Nationality.
Walt Whitman
#67. Days will prove that the assassination policy will not finish the Hamas. Hamas leaders wish to be martyrs and are not scared of death. Jihad will continue and the resistance will continue until we have victory, or we will be martyrs.
Ahmed Yassin
#69. It is not a process of bargaining or give-and-take. The peace process is not about giving concessions. We will not allow any step which would hurt the memories of our martyrs.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
#70. Scheler writes: It is not the glowing prospect of a happy afterlife, but the experienced happiness of being in a state of grace of God while in throes of agony that released the wonderful powers in the martyrs.
Timothy Keller
#71. Those of us with the courage to open ourselves to that much love and not fear it - who can give joy to a dying child until the very end without withdrawing to save ourselves - those are our saints. It is not the martyrs. It is never the martyrs.
Derek Miller
#72. And there the stories
Of martyrs awed, as Spagnoletto tainted
His brush with all the blood of all the sainted.
George Gordon Byron
#73. Our land is the dearer of our sacrifices. The blood of our martyrs sanctifies and enriches it. Their spirit passes into thousands of hearts. How costly is the progress of the race. It is only by the giving of life that we can have life.
Edward Joseph Young
#74. Russian people, like their Chinese comrades, are well aware of what is going on. And there are tens of millions of their martyrs who are reminding them what is to be expected from the West.
Andre Vltchek
#75. It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that
I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the
truth at all.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#76. Vice has more martyrs than virtue; and it often happens that men suffer more to be lost than to be saved.
Charles Caleb Colton
#77. What I do know is that Charlie Hebdo cartoonists have been converted into the closest thing the West has to religious-like martyrs in the war against radical Islam, which means that anything short of pure reverence for them generates tribal rage and vilification.
Glenn Greenwald
#78. Pontus , instituted among all people, as an addition or corollary of devotion towards God , that festival days and assemblies should be celebrated to them who had contended for the faith (that is, to lie martyrs ).
Isaac Newton
#79. Men are bad cyclists, hunters of wild animals, kamikazes, samurai and Christian martyrs.
Christine Gran
#80. We may never be martyrs but we can die to self, to sin, to the world, to our plans and ambitions. That is the significance of baptism; we died with Christ and rose to new life.
Vance Havner
#81. We're Catholics before we're Democrats. We're Catholics before we're Republicans. We're even Catholics before we're Americans, because we know that God has a demand on us prior to any government demand on us. And this has been the story of the martyrs through the centuries.
Charles J. Chaput
#82. When the hanging's done and the embers at the burning stake are grayed and cold, the conquered bodies of martyrs become the unconquerable ideas.
Nelson Peery
#83. In the long, fierce struggle for freedom of opinion, the press, like the Church, counted its martyrs by thousands.
James A. Garfield
#84. Everyone hates a martyr; it's no wonder martyrs were burned at the stake.
E.W. Howe
#85. We are, for all our polish, of little
stature, and, as human lives,
compared with authentic martyrs,
of no account.
W. H. Auden
#86. Throughout the Middle Ages, art and architecture had a spiritual mission: to direct man's attention toward God. Churches soared in that direction, and sculpture and paintings pointed the way to paradise. They depicted the sufferings of Christ, the Apostles, martyrs, the Last Judgment, and so on.
Jesse Bryant Wilder
#87. Martyrs, martyrs, martyrs, ... we want a million martyrs to march on Jerusalem.
Yasser Arafat
#88. Those who die for their country are martyrs and those who live for their country are greater martyrs.
Bhagat Puran Singh
#89. I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.
Hannah Senesh
#90. While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.
John B. S. Haldane
#91. Beyond all the other reasons not to do it, free speech assaults always backfire: they transform bigots into martyrs.
Glenn Greenwald
#92. We must acknowledge that for scores of years the Iraqis have offered martyrs and victims but have not been able to change the regime.
Jalal Talabani
#93. We are humans, they say we are mortals. Though we do live once but can last forever.
M.H. Rakib
#94. Martyrs and persecutors are the same type of man. As to which is the persecutor and which the martyr, this is only a question of transient power.
Elbert Hubbard
#95. If we make sacrifices in doing good or in doing ill, it does not alter the ultimate value of our actions; even if we stake our life in the cause, as martyrs do for the sake of our church : it is a sacrifice to our longing for power, or for the purpose of conserving our sense of power.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#96. For having expressed an opinion, however far-fetched, we straightway become its slave, ready to die defending it, and even ready to believe it. And many continue to be martyrs to causes which have ceased to exist, their crowns rusting upon their heads as tin wreaths rust upon forgotten tombs.
Paul Eldridge
#97. The pages of history are red with the blood of illuminated "saints" who were murdered by their religions for actually achieving the advertised spiritual rewards.
Christopher S. Hyatt
#98. I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost.
Viktor E. Frankl
#99. Nothing is sacred. Not even your own mother, not the Jewish martyrs, not even people starving of hunger. Laugh at everything, ferociously, bitterly, to exorcise the old monsters.
Francois Cavanna
#100. We don't know why God chose to deliver Peter from death and James through death. The text doesn't say.
K. Howard Joslin
