Quotes About The Jesuits

#1. I entered the diocesan seminary. I liked the Dominicans, and I had Dominican friends. But then I chose the Society of Jesus, which I knew well because the seminary was entrusted to the Jesuits. Three things in particular struck me about the Society: the missionary spirit, community and discipline.

Pope Francis

#2. Without the Jesuits you wouldn't be enjoying your gin and tonic.

James Martin

#3. If history is written by the victors, conspiracy theory is typically written by the losers, and there were few greater losers in the revolution than the French church and especially the Jesuits.

Mike Jay

#4. And because people loved conspiracy theories even back then, suddenly everyone became a member of the Illuminati: Galileo, the Babylonian goddess Lilith, Lucifer, and eventually even the Jesuits themselves.

Ferdinand Von Schirach

#5. 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

#6. I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits ... If ever any congregation of men could merit eternal perdition on earth, and in hell, according to these historians, though, like Pascal, true Catholics, it is this company of Loyolas.

John Adams

#7. My history of the Jesuits is not elegantly written, but is supported by unquestionable authorities, is very particular and very horrible. Their restoration is indeed "a step toward darkness," cruelty, perfidy, despotism, death and I wish we were out of danger of bigotry and Jesuitism.

John Adams

#8. The Jesuits have a vow to obey the pope, but if the pope is a Jesuit, maybe he should have a vow to obey the superior general ... I feel like I'm still a Jesuit in terms of my spirituality, what I have in my heart.

Pope Francis

#9. The Jesuits were good educators, exceptional teachers. In an era and in a society where freedom of speech was not held in high regard, of course, that the discourse be focused on what they were teaching, but we were able to go beyond this framework without incurring too great a risk.

Pierre Trudeau

#10. I'm very interested in the history of Christianity, and what I can say for sure is that the Catholics and the Jesuits and stuff were very big on teaching and on learning.

Ben Mendelsohn

#11. Philosophers see no harm in the Jesuits other than in their effect on humanity and the sciences. The vulgar and especially the prejudiced only hate them from an envy and jealousy born out of conspiracy and intrigue at an organisation which overshadows them.

Cesare Beccaria

#12. The Jesuits had learned that a Christian mission to China could never succeed if it were not in a position to show and convince the Chinese intelligentsia of the superiority of the European culture.

Hu Shih

#13. The Jesuits I know who have died and all their lives were great teachers, they're the least remembered people.

Daniel Berrigan

#14. My History of the Jesuits is in four volumes ... This society has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.

John Adams

#15. The war, the American Civil War of 1861-1865, would never have been possible without the sinister influence of the Jesuits.

Abraham Lincoln

#16. We invent casuistical arguments for ourselves, we take a lesson from the Jesuits, and, for a time, contrive to allay our own doubts and convince ourselves that what we are doing is necessary, absolutely necessary, in a good cause. That is the way we are made; it is all as clear as daylight.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#17. After learning the language and culture of the Chinese people, these Jesuits began to establish contacts with the young intellectuals of the country.

Hu Shih

#18. Aristotle was convinced that a trained memory helped the development of logical thought processes.

Janet M. Tavakoli

#19. The FBI had been a man's world - usually men of Irish or Italian heritage schooled by Jesuits and raised in a closed culture of police and priests.

Tim Weiner

#20. Jesuits like to invite people into imaginative prayer. That's a classic Jesuit way to pray - to say, what would it look like, sound like, feel like to be in certain parts of the Bible.

Anonymous

#21. The homosexuals are the new Jesuits.

Laurent Binet

#22. Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as 'the Jesuit Science.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

#23. Inevitably. But women, as you may have observed, have no principles. My family don't feel my pangs of conscience. The end being to bring you and Rachel together again, my wife and daughters pass over the means employed to gain it, as composedly as if they were Jesuits." "I

Wilkie Collins

#24. A cure by regression is homeopathic, like healing the damage done by ministers and ignorance with stupidity and Jesuits.

Franz Grillparzer

#25. Marists are workers, we do all the work and Jesuits just think about it.

Warren Mundine

#26. There is no other name that mankind can be saved accept in the name of Jesus Christ, the saviour of the world.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#27. Remember that God is everywhere, all around us, constantly reaching out to us, even in the most unlikely situations.

The Irish Jesuits

#28. ...to lead an individual along a spiritual path consonant with the person's gifts and personality...[The Jesuit training of novitiates and lay students]

John W. O'Malley

#29. You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the
Jews do NOT greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews.

Benjamin Disraeli

#30. Well, I've been in several films including documentaries, but the big blockbuster, I was hired as advisor to the actors, I was trying to make Jesuits out of them.

Daniel Berrigan

#31. It's always gratifying to share a hobby with a friend, and pining for erstwhile suitors falls into that category. In the months to come, Libby and I would analyze our respective exes with the gusto and intellectual rigor of Jesuits.

Patricia Marx