Edmund Burke Quotes

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.

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

It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.

Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.

The most rabidly religious people are the most rabidly evil.

Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.

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.

Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it

In the name of their deity, these self-styled keepers of public morality exhibit the most outrageous forms of discrimination, hate, and intimidation against those who challenge organized prayer in public schools.

It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples?

Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.

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.

The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings.

The intolerance of the Middle, and even later, Ages, is a fact all too familiar to every one.

People are willing to do the most appalling things to another person for the sake of imposing a religious belief.

Cruel persecutions and intolerance are not accidents, but grow out of the very essence of religion, namely, its absolute claims.

We cannot judge Christianity by the Ku Klux Klan and we cannot judge Islam by the Taliban.

Sectarianism, bigotry, and it's horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful Earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization, and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.

Everything Mohammed brought was evil and inhuman such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached

He who changes his religion must be killed.

To what great evils has religion been able to impel men.

Nothing can be more hateful than the uncharitableness of the Puritans, who condemn … to eternal torments, even the most inoffensive proselytes to popery.