Andrew Dickson White Quotes

Intolerance has always been one of the cornerstones of Christianity - the glorious heritage of the Inquisition. It's no coincidence that most of my abusive mail - sentencing me to exquisite Oriental tortures and relegating me to hell-fire and damnation -comes from self-admitted Catholics.

What! Have you no monks to teach, to dispute, to govern, to intrigue and to burn people who do not agree with them?

That religious earnestness forever tends toward fright and hence towards brittleness and inquisition is clear enough in mythology and history.

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

Historically the Puritans left England to escape religious persecution, and they promptly turned around and started persecuting the people they didn't agree with - the scarlet letter A, and the stocks and the dunking board came from that. That puritanism is still there.

One of the problems with the identification of Christianity with love is how such a view turns out to be both anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. The Jews and Catholics become identified with the law or dogma, in contrast to Protestant Christians, who are about love.

Though I do regard the Inquisition in general and the burning of Giordano Bruno in particular as blots on the history of the Roman Catholic Church, I am far from being actuated by hatred of that church, and in fact cannot imagine that European civilization would have developed or survived without it.

Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself.

All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.

He who changes his religion must be killed.

A religion that requires persecution to sustain it is of the devil’s propagation.

Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and overzealous piety.

The slayers of the heretics are the worst heretics of all.

If my son were to oppose the Catholic Church, I myself would carry the faggots to burn him.

The Church burned Bruno and imprisoned Galileo. The Church has lived by its monopolies and conquered by its intolerance.

Neither experience nor improvement can root out the inveterate prejudices of the Roman Catholics, or render them less cruel or inexorable to Protestants.

No orthodox church ever had power that it did not endeavor to make people think its way by force and flame.

[Spanish] unreasoning religious ardor culminated in the Inquisition, established for the purpose of securing the supreme good of unblemished purity and uniformity of belief. Nothing was allowed to stand in the way of this, and no sacrifice was deemed too great for its accomplishment. All officials, from the king downward, were sworn to its support, and the sinister influence which it exercised was proportioned to the enormous power which it wielded.

To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.

You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense, I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.

We seem to be the victims of religious dogma, both from the Christian Right here and, of course, in the East with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

If a man wishes to have God recognized in the constitution of our country, let him read the history of the Inquisition, and let him remember that hundreds of millions of men, women, and children have been sacrificed to placate the wrath, or win the approbation of this god.

In proportion to its power, Protestantism has been as persecuting as Catholicism.