George Herbert Quotes

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

I have always marveled that so many religions exact such revenge against dissenters. It only weakens the appeal of their faith and contradicts any claims they might have made that 'all religions are basically the same.' If all religions were indeed the same, why not let someone be 'converted' to another religion?

I do affirm I was never, nor am, a popish Recusant—or popishly affected

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.

May it please you to take away my life rather than the old religion.

We all know that those who instigate those doubts are the enemies of God, the enemies of religion and the enemies of all humanity. Their hearts are full of hatred.

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

It is certainly no part of religion to compel religion.

Amongst so many captives taken, so many nations forced under their [the Ancient Jewish Kingdom’s] obedience, we find not one man forced into the Jewish Religion and the worship of the true God and punished for idolatry, though all of them were certainly guilty of it.

A heretic can be tolerated. But a heresy cannot.

In politics, as in religion, it so happens, that we have less charity for those who believe the half of our creed, than for those that deny the whole of it; since if Servetus had been a Mohammedan, he would not have been burnt by Calvin.

If we import compulsion in matters of religion, there is no doubt that we shall be committing suicide.

A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves what everyone else believes.

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.

A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb.

To change one's religion under the threat of force is no conversion but rather cowardice.

Atheism was natural enough, but heresy seemed strange. For, surely, if one could believe anything, one could believe everything.

Every sermon must contain a certain shot of heresy.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next. Mere tolerance has given place to a sentiment of brotherhood between sincere men of all denominations.

In our domain we neither allow any Muslim to change his religion nor allow any other religion to propagate its faith.

To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation.

Persecution is as necessary to religion as pruning to an orchard.

Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but it is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the pope, armed with fire and fagot, and the other is the pope selling or granting indulgences.

Men can be attracted but not forced to the faith. You may drive people to baptism, (but) you won't move them one step further in religion.

The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realised, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale.