Martyrdom Quotes

The classic Aryan who idolized himself and who existed in his own dreams could not bear to see the Jew, the evidence of divine reality,and he would kill him.

André Frossard

Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.

Ursula K Le Guin

The noble heart will find no shortage of places to offer itself in martyrdom, but you cannot die on every battlefield.”~ Duncan Sinclair, from The Outcast Highlander

R.L. Syme

I suppose it's something to do with her black-brained religion not to take care of the body.

Evelyn Waugh

The anarch sticks to facts, not ideas. He suffers not for facts but because of them, and usually through his own fault, as in a traffic accident. Certainly, there are unforeseeable things – maltreatments. However, I believe I have attained a certain degree of self-distancing that allows me to regard this as an accident.

Ernst Jünger

You're mad, you missionaries,' ejaculated Tai Haruru angrily. 'What good do you think you do, crawling out to the extremities of all the different world's ends and dying there like lizards spiked on sticks?'Brother Balaam jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at the church behind him. 'Ye'll get no civilization worth havin' in a new country unless ye lay down a few martyrs' bones for a foundation,' he said. 'They generate. Slow but sure.

Elizabeth Goudge

A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His ways. It is never the design of man; for the true martyr is he who has become the instrument of God, who has lost his will in the will of God, and who no longer desires anything for himself, not even the glory of being a martyr.

T.S Eliot

...in a brutal country like ours where human life is cheap, it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs, high ideals--only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.' 'Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.

Orhan Pamuk

With no doubt Al Hussain was one of the greatest rebels, for correcting the path of rulers who deviated from the right path. He, by his stance honorably acquired martyrdom martyrdom that free people wish to acquire.

Leo Tolstoy

The problem with martyrs is that they’re all dead. What do they have to do with us that are simple enough to still be alive? Should we just give up and want to die because death is better than dishonor? But suicide is a sin too so we really are damned if we do and damned if we don't.

Rosamund Hodge

I am not going to leave this land, I will die as a martyr at the end … I shall remain, defiant. Muammar is leader of the revolution until the end of time.

Muammar Gaddafi

They call me a tyrant . . . One arrives at a tyrant's throne by the help of scoundrels . . . What faction do I belong to? You yourselves. What is that faction which, since the Revolution began, has crushed the factions and swept away hireling traitors? It is you, it is the people, it is the principles of the Revolution.

Maximilien de Robespierre

We would do our theology better if more was at stake in what we said.

John Piper

A heroic, losing battle! I'm tired of brave men who die. There's nothing pretty about losing.

Warren Eyster

We will martyr ourselves, suffering under the weight of a non-reciprocal relationship until some part of us bursts in protest. Suddenly, we lose our mind, and allowing ourselves to heap all manner of nastiness, name calling, patronizing, death threats on the “deserving” jerk who has it coming after all we do for him/her! As the final insult rings across the room and we regain consciousness, we are horrified by what has come out of our mouth. After all, we LOVE these people, and we quickly move into anxious terror that this time we have gone too far . . . this time we crossed the line and they will leave us. So, we hunker back down and the martyrdom begins again. It’s a terrible cycle.

Mary Crocker Cook

Often the contempt of vainglory becomes a source of even more vainglory, for it is not being scorned when the contempt is something one is proud of.

Augustine of Hippo

What if you had seen haven open as Stephen did, and all the saints there triumphing in glory, and enjoying the end of their labours and sufferings, what a life would you lead after such a sight as this! Why, you will see this with your eyes before it be long.Thou hast the more cause to doubt a great deal, because thou never didst doubtl and yet more because thou hast been so careless in thy confidence. What do these expressions discover, but a wilful neglect of thy own salvation? As a shipmaster that should let his vessel alone, and mind other matters, and say, I will venture it among the rocks, and sands, and gulfs, and waves, and winds; I will never touble myself to know wheter it shall come safe to the harbour; I will trust God with it; it will speed as well as other men's vessels do. Indeed, as well as other men's that are as careless and idle, but not so well as other mens's that are diligent and watchful. What horrible abuse of God is this, for men to pretend that they trust God with their souls only to cloak their own wilful negligence! (290-291)

Richard Baxter

Some men are sent to heaven by torturers who thought they were doing god's work by sending them to hell

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Without love everything can be nothing. Does that make me want to love? No. For me, Ignorance is still better than martyrdom.

Ira N. Barin

Islam is not unusual in having a tradition of martyrs. What is unique to Islam is the tradition of murderous martyrdom, in which the individual martyr simultaneously commits suicide and kills others for religious reasons.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.

Chuck Palahniuk

What is the return on investment of being wedded to your suffering? What do you receive from stewing in victim consciousness? Righteous indignation or an excuse not to change?

Lisa Cypers Kamen

Can you die for a false idea? Yes. The reason you die is that you believe it’s not a false idea

Bangambiki Habyarimana

If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise, just bogus self-improvement on our own terms.

Richard Rohr

The claim at the heart of this book has been carefully researched by several generations of scholars and is orthodox in academic circles, if not beyond. Christians under the Roman Empire were neither constantly persecuted nor martyred in huge numbers for their faith. They were prosecuted from time to time for alleged sedition, holding illegal meetings or refusing to sacrifice to the emperor. They were, like other convicts, sometimes tortured and executed in horrible ways. They seem to have been regarded by many Romans with distaste as a particularly silly superstition. But Christian stories of thousands of individual and mass martyrdoms over centuries have at best a limited basis in historical fact, and in many cases are sheer fiction.

Teresa Morgan

As Luxenberg's work has only recently been published we must await its scholarly assessment before we can pass any judgements. But if his analysis is correct then suicide bombers, or rather prospective martyrs, would do well to abandon their culture of death, and instead concentrate on getting laid 72 times in this world, unless of course they would really prefer chilled or white raisins, according to their taste, in the next.

Ibn Warraq

If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

Antonin Artaud

Is not the true respect and worship of God the exercising of our power in such a way that we are also respected?

Shannon L. Alder

A man of God has many brothers. He is a wounded soldier - he is familiar with the pain one feels in his heart, as a close and loving brother, when a brother falls victim of evil men or turns to evil desires (the latter sometimes even betrayal). Because of this, too, he is and must be well-acquainted with and trained in the strengths of hope and the gentleness of forgiveness and mercy.

Criss Jami

A christian martyrdom is never an accident, for Saints are not made by accident.

T.S Eliot

How like God's love yours has been to me- so wise, so generous, and so unsparing!" exclaimed Pancratius. "Promise me one thing more- that is, that you will stay near to me to the end, and carry my last legacy to my mother.

Nicholas Wiseman

I know you not quite wellYet I foolishly surrender my mind to you. Slowly and carefully you have cast a spellNow my virgin heart only longs for you. There is no need to push, I am already falling. Once proudly tall, I’m no longer standing. Knowing well that I am doomed to misery,I will roll the dice and take delight in my suffering.

Kamand Kojouri

A willing heart will believe anything and die for anything

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads us to death.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

But its exclusive character and irreconcileable hostility to the religious cults and ceremonies with which the whole social life of the city-state and the empire were inseparably connected at every turn, brought the Christians into inevitable conflict with the government and with public opinion. To the man in the street, the Christian was an anti-social atheist who would take no part in the public feasts and the games, which played such a large part in city life. To the authorities he was a passive rebel, who would neither take his share of municipal offices nor pay loyal homage to the Emperor. Hence the rise of persecution, and the driving of the Christians into an underground existence, as a proscribed sect. The Church grew under the shadow of the executioner's rods and axes, and every Christian lived in the peril of physical torture and death. The thought of martyrdom coloured the whole outlook of early Christianity. But it was not only a fear, it was also an ideal and a hope. For the martyr was the complete Christian, he was the champion and hero of the new society and its conflict with the old, and even the Christians who failed in the moment of the trial - the lapsi - looked on the martyrs as their saviours and protectors

Christopher Henry Dawson

Politics, like religion, hold up the torches of martyrdom to the reformers of error.

Thomas Jefferson

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Wilfred Owen

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not whol

Christopher Hitchens

There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.

Albert Dietrich

I never wanted to be a martyr—even for love. I don’t want to die for love. I want to live for it.

Kamand Kojouri

A man may indeed be an honest man; but the folly of sacrifice, of virginity, of devotedness, of martyrdom, arises only from faith in the folly of the Cross.

Emile Bougaud

Christopher Hitchens

For the church, the many abuses of human life, liberty, and dignity are a heartfelt suffering. The church, entrusted with the earth’s glory, believes that in each person is the Creator’s image and that everyone who tramples it offends God. As holy defender of God’s rights and of his images, the church must cry out. It takes as spittle in its face, as lashes on its back, as the cross in its passion, all that human beings suffer, even though they be unbelievers. They suffer as God’s images. There is no dichotomy between man and God’s image. Whoever tortures a human being, whoever abuses a human being, whoever outrages a human being abuses God’s image, and the church takes as its own that cross, that martyrdom.

Oscar A. Romero

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.

Søren Kierkegaard

I have been astonished that men could die martyrsfor their religion--I have shuddered at it,I shudder no more.I could be martyred for my religion.Love is my religionand I could die for that.I could die for you.My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet.

John Keats

Martyrdom Quotes

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