It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning...

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.(“Literature, Revolution, and Entropy”)

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

Tomorrow”)

One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—’may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn...

All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.

It was not Christianity which freed the slave: Christianity accepted slavery; Christian ministers defended it; Christian merchants trafficked in human flesh and blood, and drew their profits from the unspeakable horrors of the middle passage....

If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities...

Without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally; you may endure for a time, but under affliction or persecution your faith will not last. This is why many in this age (and in every...

Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic