Eric Hoffer Quotes

Indeed heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy.

The Sword and its law have existed from the beginning of the world. The use of force can never prevent heresy.

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy, and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church.

What survived as orthodox Christianity did so by suppressing and forcibly eliminating a lot of other material.

A heretic, my dear sir, is a fellow who disagrees with you regarding something neither of you knows anything about.

There would never have been an infidel had there never been a priest.

… some parties think that only the rules laid down by their doctrines are the right ones.

Better heresy of doctrine than heresy of heart.

Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

In corporation [corporate] religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right.

When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

Heresy is a word which, when it is used without passion, signifies a private opinion. So the different sects of the old philosophers, Academians, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics, &c., were called heresies.

Doctrines like Christianity or Islam or Marxism require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions.

Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable; the principles of it are troublesome.

There are a few people who are, let's say, personality-challenged, who would like to set up a cult, but in large part they fail due to the innate stroppiness and independence of their fellow pagans.

We are bound to be diligently watchful after the manner of a vigilant Shepherd and to ensure most carefully that certain people who consider the study of the truth beneath them should be driven out of the sheepfold of Christ and no longer continue to disseminate error from positions of authority. We refer in particular to those who in this age, impelled by their sinfulness and supported by their cunning, are attacking with unusual learning and malice the discipline of the orthodox Faith, and who, moreover, by perverting the import of Holy Scripture, are striving to rend the unity of the Catholic Church and the seamless tunic of the Lord.

Religion's war against fringe beliefs is not a contest of rational and irrational. It is a contest between different fantasy systems, one having more political and financial clout than the others and, therefore, able to advertise itself into respectability.

The most potent combination is that of religion and politics, because then if you object, you are a heretic.

A single friar who goes counter to all Christianity for a thousand years must be wrong.

Those prepared to die for the truth, as a rule make many others die with them, often before them, and at times instead of them.

Special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases.

I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet.

Every church is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical.