Best 131 quotes in «persecution quotes» category

We should not covet or expect the praise of ungodly men . . . the very fact that they are inclined to persecute us is proof that we are “not of the world.

We think ourselves possessed, or at least we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact. There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny, or to doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself, it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not much better; even in our Massachusetts, which, I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemies upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any arguments for investigation into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Volney's Recherches Nouvelles? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws... but as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. {Letter to Thomas Jefferson, January 23, 1825}

With every blessing comes temptation, tests and persecution

When my mother told my father what had happened, he didn't want to believe it. "Nobody ever wants to believe what happens to the Jews," she said, "not even us.

When you face tests and persecution don’t complain, but remember that everything works together for good for those who love God

If I had not been discriminated against or had not suffered persecution, I would never have received the Nobel Prize.

While Christians in America have worshipped without the fear or threat of physical abuse for their beliefs, thousands of their brothers in Christ throughout the world have been tortured and martyred for confessing the name of Christ.

With the growth of civilisation in Europe, and with the revival of letters and of science in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ethical and intellectual criticism of theology once more recommenced, and arrived at a temporary resting-place in the confessions of the various reformed Protestant sects in the sixteenth century; almost all of which, as soon as they were strong enough, began to persecute those who carried criticism beyond their own limit. But the movement was not arrested by these ecclesiastical barriers, as their constructors fondly imagined it would be; it was continued, tacitly or openly, by Galileo, by Hobbes, by Descartes, and especially by Spinoza, in the seventeenth century; by the English Freethinkers, by Rousseau, by the French Encyclopaedists, and by the German Rationalists, among whom Lessing stands out a head and shoulders taller than the rest, throughout the eighteenth century; by the historians, the philologers, the Biblical critics, the geologists, and the biologists in the nineteenth century, until it is obvious to all who can see that the moral sense and the really scientific method of seeking for truth are once more predominating over false science. Once more ethics and theology are parting company.

Continuous persecution of widows and orphans is a crime. Even the Bible says there is a specific place in hell for those who oppress widows.

Persecution to persons in a high rank stands them in the stead of eminent virtue.

Persecution is a tribute the great must always pay for preeminence.

Persecution has never hurt the church ... only prosperity.

Persecution readily knits friendship between its victims.

Silence is the greatest persecution; never do the saints keep themselves silent.

Popularity has killed more prophets than persecution.

Preaching, power, and persecution are all apart of who we are.

Popularity has slain more prophets of God than persecution ever did.

Suspicion and persecution are weeds of the same dunghill, and flourish best together.

The advancement of all sciences, especially where there has been such a radical change, have been attended with persecution.

To charge Snowden with espionage is a severe form of political persecution.

There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is persecution to others or selfishness.

We come to the nations pretending to escape persecution, we the most deadly persecutors in all the wretched annals of man.

Where religion is trivialized, one is unlikely to find persecution.

The persecution of genius fosters its influence.

The U.S. is a Government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.

And those of us who are not directly caught up in any persecution for our Christian faith must pray for those who suffer such onslaughts. But even more importantly, we must pray for those who persecute us or our fellow Christians. It is what Jesus Christ calls us to do. And, as Saint Perpetua reported hearing during her last vision, "Do not be afraid, I am here with you, and I am laboring with you.

Yes great people are always subject to persecution and always getting into straits.

...a minority is only thought of as a minority if it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary...Just ask yourselves: what would this particular minority do if it suddenly became the majority, overnight? 'All right - now along come the liberals - including everybody in the room, I trust - and they say, 'minorities are just people, like us '. Sure, minorities are people, just like us'. Sure, minorities are people; people , not angels. Sure, they're like us - but not exactly like us; that's the all-too-familiar state of liberal hysteria, in which you begin to kid yourself you honestly cannot see a difference between a Negro and a Swede -' (Why, oh why daren't George say 'between Estelle Oxford and Buddy Sorensen'? Maybe, if he did dare, there would be a great atomic blast of laughter, and everybody would embrace, and the kingdom of heaven would begin, right here in the classroom 278. But then, again, maybe it wouldn't.) 'So,let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us, and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them, than if we try to smear out feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality. If we're frank about our feelings, we have a safety-valve; and if we have a safety-valve, we're actually less likely to start persecuting...

Any religion-based state has a mission to limit the minds of its people, to fight the developments of history and logic, and to dumb down its citizens. It’s important to stand in the way of such a mentality, to deny it from continuing its mission to murder the souls of its people, killing them deep within while they are still alive and breathing.

A wounded animal yet bears teeth

As knowing God becomes more important to you, you will stop thinking about discouragements and persecutions; you will stop worrying altogether

A state which which includes within itself a terrorized Church has lost its most faithful servant.

At heart men are antagonistic to the lordship of Jesus Christ. It is not antagonism to creeds or points of view, but antagonism encountered for My sake. Many of us awaken antagonism by our way of stating things; we have to distinguish between being persecuted for some notion of our own and being persecuted “for My sake.

Be of good comfort, Mr. Ridley, and play the man: We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust never shall be put out.

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.

Christ didn't join in. He saw which direction the rocks were being thrown, and became a shield.

Constantius decreed that any Christian who converted to Judaism was to have his property entirely confiscated (Theodosian Code 16.8.8). Under Theodosius I it was declared that any Christian who married a Jew would be guilty of the crime of adultery In the early fifth century, Jews were deprived of the right to serve in the imperial service. Later it became illegal for Jews to build or even repair a synagogue. In sum, anyone who did not subscribe to the “apostolic discipline and the evangelic doctrine” that promoted the theologically correct understanding of the Trinity (this would include Arians of various kinds) was legally pronounced “demented and insane” and was to “be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of Our own initiative, which We shall assume in accordance with the divine judgment” (Theodosian Code 16.1.2).

Being Jewish did not compromise the humanitarian and universalist ideals of my close relatives who, having experienced persecution close hand, were more concerned with bringing about peace, justice and equality in the world than in trying to cut out a niche where they could continue an insular — Jewish — fantasy.

Colonization of the world, more often than not by robbery and warfare, spread Christianity into the Americas and other corners of the earth, just as Islam was spread throughout Asia and Africa. lt is not a coincidence that the two most widespread religions in the world today are the most warlike and intolerant religions in history. Before the rise of Christianity, religious tolerance, including a large degree of religious freedom, was not only custom but in many ways law under the Roman and Persian empires. They conquered for greed and power, rarely for any declared religious reasons, and actually sought to integrate foreign religions into their civilization, rather than seeking to destroy them. People were generally not killed because they practiced a different religion. Indeed, the Christians were persecuted for denying that the popular gods existed — not for following a different religion. In other words, Christians were persecuted for being intolerant.

Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious.

During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

Du point de vue que je défends, la seule justification qui me paraît acceptable des interventions de l'État par la menace ou la force n'est pas la promotion de valeurs abstraites comme la non-domination, l'autonomie ou la dignité, mais la protection des individus à l'égard des souffrances injustes qu'on veut leur infliger: domination, persécution ou élimination. C'est pourquoi je me permets de dire que la conception de la liberté politique que je veux défendre est concrète: c'est celle des individus particuliers.

Even creative nonviolence can go unnoticed unless participants are attacked.

Eugene Debs entered jail a moderate Unionist and emerged a Socialist.

Every exceptional bias against Christianity I find to be evidence for its validity.

From the fires of persecution, can come sparks of light.

Every man and every nation at one time or other becomes the weak. That's why nobody should tolerate persecution, let alone extermination, as a precedent. (p581)

Everywhere he went, he met people belittling him, maligning his knowledge, each imitating the behavior of the other in the manner of ants, till he felt a tide building up around him, threatening to tear him down. They doubted his learning, many of them not even qualified to make any form of judgment on his work, or without having examined the charges they were throwing at him, all hankering after a notion floated around by Malavika’s father himself, that his son-in-law was a fraud.

Father Brendan Flynn: "A woman was gossiping with her friend about a man whom they hardly knew - I know none of you have ever done this. That night, she had a dream: a great hand appeared over her and pointed down on her. She was immediately seized with an overwhelming sense of guilt. The next day she went to confession. She got the old parish priest, Father O' Rourke, and she told him the whole thing. 'Is gossiping a sin?' she asked the old man. 'Was that God All Mighty's hand pointing down at me? Should I ask for your absolution? Father, have I done something wrong?' 'Yes,' Father O' Rourke answered her. 'Yes, you ignorant, badly-brought-up female. You have blamed false witness on your neighbor. You played fast and loose with his reputation, and you should be heartily ashamed.' So, the woman said she was sorry, and asked for forgiveness. 'Not so fast,' says O' Rourke. 'I want you to go home, take a pillow upon your roof, cut it open with a knife, and return here to me.' So, the woman went home: took a pillow off her bed, a knife from the drawer, went up the fire escape to her roof, and stabbed the pillow. Then she went back to the old parish priest as instructed. 'Did you gut the pillow with a knife?' he says. 'Yes, Father.' 'And what were the results?' 'Feathers,' she said. 'Feathers?' he repeated. 'Feathers; everywhere, Father.' 'Now I want you to go back and gather up every last feather that flew out onto the wind,' 'Well,' she said, 'it can't be done. I don't know where they went. The wind took them all over.' 'And that,' said Father O' Rourke, 'is gossip!

God does not permit persecution to arise without sufficient reason...He was leading us by a way that we knew not; but it was none the less His way.