Martyr Quotes - Page 8

• Religion is passionate, reckless, destructive, idol-smashing. It's a martyr burning at the stake. It's a crown of thorns and a cross.

  Martha Ostenso

  Idols, Religion, Thorns

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• Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.

  Annie Dillard

  Ideas, Joy, Secret

  Annie Dillard (2016). “An American Childhood”, p.174, Canongate Books

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• Some ministers would make good martyrs: they are so dry they would burn well.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Dry, Superstitions, Belief

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• "Gospel preachers nowadays preach the gospel of the Crucifixion, the Apostles preached the gospel of the Resurrection as well. The Crucifixion loses its meaning without the Resurrection. Without the Resurrection the death of Christ was only the heroic death of a noble martyr; with the Resurrection it is the atoning death the Son of God. It shows that death to be of sufficient value to cover our sins, for it was the sacrifice of the Son of God."

  R. A. Torrey

  Son, Sacrifice, Noble

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• Egotism erects its center in itself; love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the following moment, or with the view to a martyr's crown--indifferent whether the reward is in this life or in the next.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Gratitude, Love Is, Axes

  Friedrich Schiller (2017). “Philosophical Letters of Friedrich Schiller”, p.20, Litres

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• The unsuccessful strugglers against tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in all countries.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Law, Unsuccessful

  Instructions to his negotiators regarding a treaty with Spain, April 1792; cited in Knott, Secret and Sanctioned (1996).

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• Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,
  Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
  Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
  My heart remembers how!

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Rain, Heart, Blow

  1894 Songs of Travel (published 1896), no.45,'To S.R. Crockett (in reply to a dedication)', stanza 1.

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• Oh, I'm a martyr to music.

  Dylan Thomas

  Music, Musician

  Dylan Thomas (1954). “Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices”, p.52, New Directions Publishing

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• What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.

  John le Carre

  Thinking, Cowboy, Play

  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). Sounds like some writers.

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• To die in agony upon a cross Does not create a martyr; he must first Will his own execution.

  Henrik Ibsen

  Agony, Doe, Firsts

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• Every Age has its own peculiar faith. Any attempt to translate into facts the mission of one Age with the machinery of another, can only end in an indefinite series of abortive efforts. Defeated by the utter want of proportion between the means and the end, such attempts might produce martyrs, but never lead to victory.

  Giuseppe Mazzini

  Faith, Mean, Effort

  Giuseppe Mazzini (2005). “The Duties of Man and Other Essays”, p.165, Cosimo, Inc.

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• All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs.

  Richard Le Gallienne

  Book, Eras, Periods

  Richard Le Gallienne (1915). “Vanishing Roads, and Other Essays”

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• It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.

  John Barth

  May, Stones, Matter

  JOHN BARTH (1956). “THE FLOATING OPERA”

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• It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.

  Hannah Arendt

  Government, Opponents, Dramatic

  Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.206, Penguin

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• Look rather at the teachings of history, true history, not the history written by Party hacks: genuine democracy, the only valid democracy, is nourished with the blood of martyrs and with the blood of tyrants.

  Wei Jingsheng

  Party, Teaching, Blood

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• To say this sacred prayer [the Kaddish, prayer for the dead] for a Gentile is a most uncommon proceeding, but so unanimous and ardent is the feeling of the people of the New York ghetto in the present instance that Pres. William McKinley is spoken of in that quarter as "the loving brother of all of us," as one who "died a martyr to the freedom of Jew and Gentile.

  Abraham Cahan

  Brother, New York, Prayer

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• Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her.

  Iain Pears

  Christian, Skills, Profound

  Iain Pears (2003). “Dream of Scipio”, p.49, Penguin

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• Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It's because they're held here so lightly: they haven't yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever.

  Tana French

  Letting Go, Suicide, Commitment

  "The Likeness". Book by Tana French, 2009.

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• If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude get stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

  John Green

  Jesus, Cancer, Kids

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• Well...you're a martyr and I'm a patron saint-I can't think of anyone better!

  Neal Shusterman

  Thinking, Saint, Wells

  Neal Shusterman (2013). “UnWholly”, p.392, Simon and Schuster

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• My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Mother, Giving, Way

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• The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.

  Alan Furst

  Wise, Bankers, Paper

  Alan Furst (2008). “Night Soldiers: A Novel”, p.7, Random House

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• He was a martyr of peace but was the victim of hate. If people can't let go of the hatred of their enemies they risk sowing the seeds of hate among themselves.

  William J. Clinton

  Letting Go, Peace, Hate

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• To know how to say what other people only think, is what makes poets and sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think, makes men martyrs or reformers.

  Elizabeth Charles

  Courage, Art, Men

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• He had by now divested himself of schoolboy attitudes. He was unburdened by the desire to be a martyr or a hero. Any thoughts in that direction, Belgica effectively had quashed. Heroism in the corrupt sense of the age almost by definition, meant wanton self-sacrifice and bungling. For neither had he any taste. He wanted rational attainment; victory, but not at any price. No point upon the globe was worth the cost of a single life.

  Roland Huntford

  Life, Attitude, Hero

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