I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.

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...

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...

Hurricanes couldn’t remove you from my mind. You’re my world and I’m incapable of not loving you.

for My sake.

Christianity is anything but safe. Jesus made clear that trouble and persecution stood in the future for His followers.

Wenn wir uns der Verfolgung des freien Geistes während der Diktatur besinnen, werden wir die Freiheit jedes Gedankens und jeder Kritik schützen, so sehr sie sich auch gegen uns selbst richten mag.”[Ansprache am 8. Mai...

How should a Jew feel? There we went through the seven gates of hell for matzos. Here I stand in matzos over my head. So how should a Jew feel? You are an angel of...

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...

I remember one Gentleman objected to the Christian Faith, that it made Men insolent, quarrelsom and ill-natur’d. From whence I concluded, (as I told him) that he had never read over the Gospells; truly he...

A wounded animal yet bears teeth

I wonder what could happen if self-confessed followers of Jesus surrendered our human powers, and our desires for power, and began to celebrate openly our human weakness in exchange for the experience of Christ as...

If we are not receiving some type of ridicule for our beliefs, we are probably doing something wrong.

Wenn wir uns erinnern, wie rassisch, religiös und politisch Verfolgte, die vom sicheren Tod bedroht waren, oft vor geschlossenen Grenzen anderer Staaten standen, werden wir vor denen, die heute wirklich verfolgt sind und bei uns...

As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.

In order to improve our life for good always remember that regardless of what anyone else says and does, we are ultimately responsible for our own actions. This is the only way to experience victory,...

In the 300 years of the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence...

For every blissful moment you must an anguish meet.

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...

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

To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature...

If you live in such a manner as to stand the test of the last judgment, you can depend upon it that the world will not speak well of you.

If you are going to walk with Jesus Christ, you are going to be opposed…. In our days, to be a true Christian is really to become a scandal.

I will follow anyone… and remind everyone… of the pain of the Yazidi women

There was a feeling on the air like the eve of the end of the world.

Scientists gladly accept any new truth demonstrated by evidence, that is, proved by the very law of the cosmos. Not so with any new conceptions of religion; these are fought by the use of persecution...

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...

Stand up and wash away this shame from the face of Christ! They are spitting in His face.

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.

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...

The neo-cons, or some of them, decided that they would back Clinton when he belatedly decided for Bosnia and Kosovo against Milosevic, and this even though they loathed Clinton, because the battle against religious and...

Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you,...

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....

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution...

Kate faced the crowd. They were just eyes and teeth to her, just spit and voices. It was a moment, even, before they became people: a man with one blind eye, another whose neck was...

Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure…What’s to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims on the arena...

Let us not forget: we are a pilgrim church, subject to misunderstanding, to persecution, but a church that walks serene, because it bears the force of love.

Nothing will ever equal that moment of joyous excitement which filled my whole being when I felt myself flying away from the earth. It was not mere pleasure; it was perfect bliss. Escaped from the...

The central ideas of Christianity — an angry God and vicarious atonement — are contrary to every fact in nature, as also to the better aspirations of the human heart; they are, in our present...

Of course it’s dangerous. But it’s a lot more dangerous for all of us if we don’t do it. Even in a conquering army there are casualties. Safety is not the issue when we look...

Prejudice is a disease. And when they come for you, or refuse your worth, I will be ready for their stones. I belong to you.

… how terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed!

There’s no persecution in the Holy Land … unless you share your faith.

Everyone pretends to be ‘free thinkers’, but few individuals pass the line into expressive territories that may be detrimental to their own social well-being.

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...

Persecution is an enemy the Church has met and mastered many times. Indifference could prove to be a far more dangerous foe.

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...

And why does England thus persecute the votaries of her science? Why does she depress them to the level of her hewers of wood and her drawers of water? Is it because science flatters no...

It was strictly forbidden to preach to other prisoners. It was understood that whoever was caught doing this received a severe beating. A number of us decided to pay the price for the privilege of...