Quotes About Religious Persecution

#1. Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.

William Butler Yeats

#2. Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.

Edmund Burke

#3. People talk about history and things like slavery, genocide, and religious persecution as horrors that happened in the past because we were ignorant. But nothing's changed. We still hate what we don't understand.

J. Matthew Nespoli

#4. President Obama understands that, as a nation founded by those who fled religious persecution, freedom of religion is central to who we are as Americans. Our rights are not given to us by government, they are endowed by our Creator.

Denis McDonough

#5. Ever since you're little you hear this: 'The pilgrims left England to escape religious persecution and sneak religious freedom into the new world.' But even when you're little you're like, 'Umm.. Bullsh*t?'

Greg Proops

#6. The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.

Susan B. Anthony

#7. You can easily see why the experience of Jews would be helpful if you're looking to get action on religious persecution.

Elliott Abrams

#8. How in any way does EQUALITY with other people equate to 'religious persecution'? Does the survival of a religion depend on the vilification and desecration of the humanity of others?

Christina Engela

#9. Historically the Puritans left England to escape religious persecution, and they promptly turned around and started persecuting the people they didn't agree with - the scarlet letter A, and the stocks and the dunking board came from that. That puritanism is still there.

Hugh Hefner

#10. [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

#11. I beg you be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.

George Washington

#12. 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

#13. Not being allowed to persecute someone else in the name of your religion does NOT equate to religious persecution.

Christina Engela

#14. The spirit of religious persecution is not the special failing of any particular faith, but springs eternal in the human breast.

Dion Fortune

#15. America became a special source of attraction to people who were fleeing the aftereffects of the 30 Years War and the religious persecution that began to sweep through Europe in the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And when people got here, very often they succeeded.

Mitch Horowitz

#16. The world has always teemed with a wide variety of spiritual thought and many differing journeys of the heart. But too often the world has used these differences as a weapon. How much agony has been wrought by what should be a thing of beauty - religious passion?

Steve Goodier

#17. Religious and racial persecution is moronic at all times, perhaps the most idiotic of human stupidities.

Harry S. Truman

#18. 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

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

Oliver Ellsworth

#20. The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens. As Americans, we are blessed with circumstances that protect our human rights and our religious freedom, but for many people around the world, deprivation and persecution have become a way of life.

Jimmy Carter

#21. Christianity ... made, for nearly 1,500 years, persecution, religious wars, massacres, theological feuds and bloodshed, heresy huntings and heretic burnings, prisons, dungeons, anathemas, curses, opposition to science, hatred of liberty, spiritual bondage, the life without love or laughter ...

M. M. Mangasarian

#22. States that are built on a religious foundation limit their own people in a circle of faith and fear.

Raif Badawi

#23. People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#24. That diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution rages amoung some and to their eternal Infamy the Clergy can furnish their Quota of Imps for such business.

James Madison

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

Nicholas Murray Butler

#26. Nothing is more logical than persecution. Religious tolerance is a kind of infidelity.

Ambrose Bierce

#27. Religious tolerance is something we should all practice; however, there have been more persecution and atrocities committed in the name of religion and religious freedom than anything else.

Walter Koenig

#28. Dogma", spelled backwards, is "Am God". When a person allows someone else's dogma to become their God, they have things backwards.

Donald L. Hicks

#29. 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

#30. The emigrants although of different parties and different religious sects all flew from persecution in pursuit of liberty.

James Monroe

#31. [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

#32. Today's zealots are mostly those pretending to be anti-religious.

Criss Jami

#33. 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