Martyr Quotes - Page 12

• True joy, as it turns out, comes only to those who have devoted their lives to something greater than personal happiness. This is most visible in extraordinary lives, in saints and martyrs. But it is no less true for ordinary people like us.

  John Ortberg

  True Joy, People, Ordinary

  John Ortberg (1997). “The Life You've Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People”, p.73, Harper Collins

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• The disciples had nothing to gain by lying and starting a new religion. They faced hardship, ridicule, hostility, and martyr's deaths. In light of this, they could never have sustained such unwavering motivation if they knew what they were preaching was a lie. The disciples were not fools and Paul was a cool-headed intellectual of the first rank. There would have been several opportunities over three to four decades of ministry to reconsider and renounce a lie.

  J.P. Moreland

  Motivation, Lying, Opportunity

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• I didn't want to be either the cre`me de la cre`me or a martyr. I'd rather be a novelty, especially in a democracy that doesn't understand the language I write in.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Writing, Democracy, Want

  "Joseph Brodsky's Art of Darkness". www.washingtonpost.com. October 23, 1987.

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• Our land is the dearer of our sacrifices. The blood of our martyrs sanctifies and enriches it. Their spirit passes into thousands of hearts. How costly is the progress of the race. It is only by the giving of life that we can have life.

  Edward Joseph Young

  Heart, Sacrifice, Race

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• With me it was that defending the Communist Party was something worse than naming the names. I did not want to remain a martyr to something that I absolutely believed was immoral and wrong. It's as simple as that.

  Edward Dmytryk

  Party, Simple, Names

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• Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.

  Richard Dawkins

  Powerful, Believe, People

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• Martyrs and persecutors are the same type of man. As to which is the persecutor and which the martyr, this is only a question of transient power.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Men, Atheism, Type

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• Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods - Medievalism is real Christianity, and the medieval Christ is the real Christ.

  Oscar Wilde

  Real, Passion, Self

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “Epigrams of Oscar Wilde”, p.109, Wordsworth Editions

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• The nation, like the church, has its visible symbols and insignia, its parchments engrossed with the revealed word, its dogmas, hymns, liturgy, holy day celebrations, its early Fathers, prophets and martyrs, its priesthood and its lay sodality, its myths of sacred genesis and apocalyptic crises, its world-saving mission and its missionaries.

  Michael Parenti

  Father, Hymns, Holy Days

  Michael Parenti (1970). “The Anti-communist Impulse”

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• [W]hen the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on?

  E. O. Wilson

  Mind, Religion, Hens

  E. O. Wilson (2014). “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge”, p.364, Vintage

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• I will not go so far as to say, with a living poet, that the world knows nothing of its greatest men; but there are forms of greatness, or at least of excellence, which "die and make no sign"; there are martyrs that miss the palm, but not the stake; heroes without the laurel, and conquerors without the triumph.

  George Augustus Henry Sala

  Hero, Greatness, Men

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• When I tell people I was in the St. Justin Martyr parish, if they are native Chicagoans they know exactly where I was and what that was like. The Sunday before this particular march, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Cody, had required all of his pastors to read a letter in support of open housing and economic justice in every parish in the city.

  Sara Paretsky

  Sunday, Cities, People

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• The day of the march, we were forbidden to go to the march site. The man I worked for, the Presbyterian minister, knew we would want to be sort of martyrs for the cause and risk arrest. He didn't want any of that going on. So he made us stay in the neighborhood.

  Sara Paretsky

  Men, Risk, Want

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• martyrs are always uncomfortable people to live with.

  Susan Moody

  Sacrifice, People, Uncomfortable

  Susan Moody (1992). “Mosaic”, G K Hall & Company

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• He who suffers wins in politics. The martyr does not obtain the victory personally, but his group, his successors, win in the long run.

  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

  Running, Winning, Long

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• Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

  Ayelet Shaked

  Mother, Women, Flower

  "Letter from America: Israeli Jews, Hate Crime and Hate Speech" by Dr. Habib Siddiqui, asiantribune.com. July 27, 2014.

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• With hearts that believe in Allah's will and predetermination, we have received the news about the martyrdom of the martyr. . . . Al-Hotary, the son of Palestine, whose noble soul ascended to . . . in order to rest in Allah's Kingdom, together with the Prophets, the men of virtue, and the martyrs. The heroic martyrdom operation . . . who turned his body into bombs . . . the model of manhood and sacrifice for the sake of Allah and the homeland.

  Yasser Arafat

  Believe, Heart, Son

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• Hollywood's martyr-mythology leaves out the fact that the famed Hollywood Ten, for example, were in fact members of the Communist Party, which advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government in violation of the Smith Act and which took orders directly from Moscow.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Party, Government, Order

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• The Law waits for you to stumble on a mode of being, a soul different from the FDA-approved purple-stamped standard dead meat - & as soon as you begin to act in harmony with nature the Law garottes & strangles you - so don't play the blessed liberal middleclass martyr - accept the fact that you're a criminal & be prepared to act like one.

  Hakim Bey

  Blessed, Fda, Law

  Hakim Bey (2003). “T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism”, p.21, Autonomedia

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• Everyone hates a martyr; it's no wonder martyrs were burned at the stake.

  E. W. Howe

  Hate, Wonder, Stakes

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• The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Belief, Torture, Disbelief

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• Education must have two foundations --morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.

  Nicolas Chamfort

  Education, Self, Two

  Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort (1902). “The Cynic's Breviary: Maxims and Anecdotes from Nicolas de Chamfort”

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• No man has a right perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Truth, Men, Perception

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.86, Penguin

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• Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Writing, Suffering

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• You talk of our having an idea; we do not have an idea. The idea has us, and martyrs us, and scourges us, and drives us into the arena to fight and die for it, whether we want to or not.

  Heinrich Heine

  Writing, Fighting, Ideas

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