Top 100 Quotes About Persecution
#1. Popularity has slain more prophets of God than persecution ever did.
Vance Havner
#2. And in times and places where there was not much persecution, people could become and continue Christians who neither were nor professed to be very devoted persons.
Robert Rainy
#3. If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
[Freedom of the Park, Tribune, 7 December 1945]
George Orwell
#4. Whatever the rationale, the suppression of unorthodox cancer therapies and the sustained persecution of their proponents by government and colleagues runs counter to freedom of thought, much less freedom of choice.
Marilyn Ferguson
#5. We are the new "barbarians", forged in iron hardness in the fires of their hate and persecution. All over the world, we wait to pounce ...
George Lincoln Rockwell
#6. Dream not that worldlings will admire you, or that the more holy and the more Christ-like you are, the more peaceably people will act towards you. They prized not the polished gem, how should they value the jewel in the rough?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#7. Ty Cobb was still fighting the Civil War, and as far as he was concerned, we were all damn Yankees. But who knows, if he hadn't had that terrible persecution complex, he never would have been about the best ballplayer who ever lived.
Sam Crawford
#8. O that we would so love the gospel and have so much compassion for lost people that tribulation and distress and persecution and famine and nakedness and danger and sword and gun and terrorist would turn us not into fearful complainers, but bold heralds of good news.
John Piper
#9. And it is not enough in the world for a wise brain to be ridiculed, it must also be wounded & mistreated; a head that is a treasury of wisdom should not expect any crown other than one of thorns. What garland can human wisdom expect when it sees what divine wisdom received?
Juana Ines De La Cruz
#10. Today, the greatest challenge facing American evangelicals is not persecution from the world, but seduction by the world.
C.J. Mahaney
#11. Even creative nonviolence can go unnoticed unless participants are attacked.
Mark Kurlansky
#12. Small streams of hatred can quickly lead to unstoppable, horrific things, so [people] should stand up to any type of persecution or discrimination, whether bullying or malicious gossip.
Susan Pollack
#13. Government "help" to business is just as disastrous as government persecution ... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.
Ayn Rand
#14. 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
#15. May the power of Christ, which brings freedom and service, be felt in so many hearts afflicted by war, persecution and slavery.
Pope Francis
#16. There are about 15 million Muslims in the EU. They face ignorance, insult and even persecution. They cannot be wished away. To impose Enlightenment freedoms is self-defeating. Anyway, the Muslims have their own enlightenment.
James Buchan
#17. History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.
Edward Gibbon
#18. 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
#19. To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#20. Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday ... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side ... in the great ideological wars of our time.
Isaiah Berlin
#21. The beginning point at both conferences must be that everything is a woman's issue. That means racism in a woman's issue, just as is anti-Semitism, Palestinian homelessness, rural development, ecology, the persecution of lesbians, and the exploitative practices of global corporations.
Charlotte Bunch
#22. As humanism begins to dominate the state, the consequence is complete hostile annexation of the church or persecution by separation. Religion is then removed from the marketplace and the school, later from other domains of public life. The state will not toerlate any gods besides itself.
Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
#23. Today's zealots are mostly those pretending to be anti-religious.
Criss Jami
#24. A spirit of thankfulness is one of the most distinctive marks of a Christian whose heart is attuned to the Lord. Thank God in the midst of trials and every persecution.
Billy Graham
#25. Though it is evident, that not more than one age or people can deserve the censure of being more averse from learning than any other, yet at all times knowledge must have encountered impediments, and wit been mortified with contempt, or harassed with persecution.
Samuel Johnson
#26. Our nearness to the king in love is nearness to those who love not the king.
William Shakespeare
#27. I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
Jonathan Swift
#28. Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.
Walter Bagehot
#29. If you take a stand [for God] and mean it, you may suffer persecution. Some of your friends will drift away. They don't want to be with people like you. You speak to their conscience. They feel uncomfortable in your presence because you live for God.
Billy Graham
#30. If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.
Arthur Koestler
#31. Groucho Marx shot back angrily, "The Sandy McPhersons and Yonny Yohnsons were not a minority being subjected to oppression, restriction, segregation or persecution.
Kliph Nesteroff
#32. If these modern peoples could inflict the most barbaric treatment and persecution on another group of human beings, then there was something very, very deplorable with our species. No amount of education or technological progress was going to make any difference in altering human savagery.
Mitchell Diamond
#33. The church that took two thousand years to build in Iraq and Syria, started by the apostles themselves, has nearly been destroyed in the blink of an eye at the hands of manics who won't stop until they win or they die. At least that's what everyone I met in Iraq believes. Every single one of them.
Johnnie Moore
#34. Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
George Eliot
#35. [The Drafters of the Constitution] were intent on avoiding more than 100 years of religious intolerance and persecution in American colonial history and an even longer heritage of church-state problems in Europe.
John M Swomley
#36. Now whenever things are so that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord.
H.G.Wells
#37. Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practitioners' persecution.
Thomas Frank
#38. Knowledge of God's Word is a bulwark against deception, temptation, accusation, even persecution.
Edwin Louis Cole
#39. Bearing our cross does not mean wearing gunny sacks and long faces. Some people ... wear the look of a martyr every time they hear criticism. Sometimes we deserve the criticism we receive; however, we are blessed only when men speak evil against us falsely for Christ's sake.
Billy Graham
#40. Any love is condemned to suffer a murderous persecution. We are impotent of feeling and do not forgive other people's love. So don't let anyone know that you love.
Nelson Rodrigues
#41. If one fears men much he will never do anything great for God: all that one does for God arouses persecution.
Ignatius Of Loyola
#42. I'm an atheist, so it was actually a joy. Spitting on Christ was a great deal of fun. I can't embrace a male god who has persecuted female sexuality throughout the ages. And that persecution still goes on today all over the world.
Amanda Donohoe
#43. Persecution is one of the natural consequences of living the Christian life. It is to the Christian what "growing pains" are to the growing child. No pain, no development. No suffering, no glory. No struggle, no victory. No persecution, no reward!
Billy Graham
#44. Stand up and wash away this shame from the face of Christ! They are spitting in His face.
Sabina Wurmbrand
#45. My life has been immensely enriched by gay mentors, colleagues and friends, and any discrimination and persecution of gay people is unacceptable.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#46. The emigrants although of different parties and different religious sects all flew from persecution in pursuit of liberty.
James Monroe
#47. Persecution is simply the clash between two irreconcilable value-systems.
John Stott
#48. And at home in the United States we found continued and increased persecution, first of leaders of the Communist Party, and then of all honest anti-fascists.
Paul Robeson
#49. Even before Melanchthon sank into his grave, he was dismayed at seeing Lutheranism stiffen into dogmas and formulas, and heartbroken by a persecution from his fellow-Protestants more bitter than anything he had ever experienced from Catholics.
Andrew Dickson White
#50. I'm the only English thing they can vent their anger on.
Harold Holzer
#51. From the fires of persecution, can come sparks of light.
Tom Althouse
#52. You know what, citizens? If you don't have a gun - I'm telling you as a Christian chaplain - sell your clothes, and buy a gun. It's time! The government persecution will be coming against you, and you needs to arm yourselves ...
Gordon Klingenschmitt
#53. Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.
Edmund Burke
#54. The habit of considering a man's religious, moral and political opinions before appointing him to a post or giving him a job is the modern form of persecution.
Bertrand Russell
#55. We come to the nations pretending to escape persecution, we the most deadly persecutors in all the wretched annals of man.
Samuel Roth
#56. Rage can easily convert to hatred. There is a wish to control the bad object in order to avoid persecution or fear. This control is achieved by the development of obsessive control mechanisms, which psychopathologically regulate the repression of aggression in such an individual.
Sam Vaknin
#58. Throughout history, when societies face tough economic times, we have seen democratic reforms deferred, decreased trust in government, persecution of minority groups, and a general shrinking of the democratic space.
Samantha Power
#59. Persecution may wear an insulting face. Insults may come as a result of a Christian's lifestyle, which should be different from that of the secular world.
Billy Graham
#60. Liao writes with the courage of a man who knows loss and doesn't fear it. There is nothing to make him notice like an official injunction against noticing, nothing to make him listen like official deafness, nothing that drives him to make us see like the blindness that officialdom seeks to impose.
Liao Yiwu
#61. War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.
Anatole France
#62. Even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich.
Arthur Bryant
#63. Suspicion and persecution are weeds of the same dunghill, and flourish best together.
Thomas Paine
#65. Fanaticism is the child of false zeal and of superstition, the father of intolerance and of persecution.
John William Fletcher
#66. We are united by something greater and more valuable than our beliefs alone: the freedom to have those beliefs, and believe what we want without persecution - we must protect that at all costs.
A.J. Darkholme
#67. Christ didn't join in. He saw which direction the rocks were being thrown, and became a shield.
Criss Jami
#68. Yes great people are always subject to persecution and always getting into straits.
Friedrich Schiller
#69. The church should not be pampered but rather prepare for, and expect, persecution - for it is Christ's body on earth.
Billy Graham
#70. The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#71. Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.
Richard Whately
#72. We all do that to ourselves. Explain irrationally the rational. We make up stories in our heads instead of looking at the facts. We force persecution on ourselves when there is none.
Kunal Nayyar
#73. Persecution of Christians is growing around the world, and Congress needs to pay more attention to it.
Elliott Abrams
#74. The first persecution of the Church took place in the year 67, under Nero, the sixth emperor of Rome.
John Foxe
#75. Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#76. It is unjust, but only Christlike, to suffer persecution for doing what is right.
Joyce Rachelle
#77. Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plan religion.
Thomas Browne
#78. 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
#80. Maybe people had no choice but I wonder sometimes what would have happened if everyone without a choice would have made a choice anyway. If we all chose not to participate. Not to be bullied. Not to take up arms. Not to persecute. What would happen then?
Amy Harmon
#81. She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity and repression tip into psychosis, persecution, and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic, injury-cherishing twin. Like
Shirley Jackson
#82. The systematic murder of Christians in the Middle East is a horrible atrocity, and all of us should be united against it. Likewise, we should speak with one voice against the persecution of Jews, usually being carried out by the very same jihadist radicals.
Ted Cruz
#83. Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
William Butler Yeats
#84. Persecution is as necessary to religion as pruning to an orchard.
Austin O'Malley
#85. Thousands of Christians compromise their faith in Jesus Christ by denying Him. Even some clergymen neglect or deliberately refuse to close a public prayer in the name of Jesus for fear of offending an unbeliever. They cannot endure the persecution that may follow an acknowledgment of Jesus Christ.
Billy Graham
#86. Well, there is nothing we can do about it. We have to put up with these snakes, dogs, and swine surrounding us and corrupting the Gospel both in doctrine and in life. Wherever there are faithful preachers they always have to take this. Such is the fortune of the Gospel in the world.
Martin Luther
#87. If the Tiber rises too high, or the Nile too low, the remedy is always feeding Christians to the lions.
Tertullian
#88. Persecution has not crushed it, power has not beaten it back, time has not abated its force, and, what is most wonderful of all, the abuses and treasons of its friends have not shaken its stability.
Horace Bushnell
#89. Nevertheless, to the persecution and tyranny of his cruel ministry we will not tamely submit
appealing to Heaven for the justice of our cause, we determine to die or be free.
Joseph Warren
#90. There was a time when skepticism was an act of rebellion. Since to a degree I both believe in evolution and have faith, I can only conclude that, as prophesied, to have faith will someday be an act of rebellion.
Criss Jami
#91. Persecution was at least a sign of personal interest. Tolerance is composed of nine parts of apathy to one of brotherly love.
Frank Moore Colby
#92. ...our history, the history of European Jews...they will never forgive us for the evil they've done to us
Marceline Loridan-Ivens
#93. How terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed!
E.A. Bucchianeri
#94. Persecution is an enemy the Church has met and mastered many times. Indifference could prove to be a far more dangerous foe.
Brother Andrew
#95. Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
Voltaire
#96. The three most powerful and most apparent means used by Rome to retain her power over the minds of her votaries are Ignorance, Superstition, and Persecution.
Charles Spurgeon
#97. Patience includes perseverance - the ability to bear up under weariness, strain, and persecution when doing the work of the Lord.
Billy Graham
#98. Persecution is the heirloom of the church, and the ensign of the elect.
Charles Spurgeon
#99. 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
#100. The early Church was birthed and sustained in almost constant persecution and pressures
Greg Gordon
