Martyrs Quotes

“The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs... In fact, the Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.

[Letter to James Smith discussing Jefferson's hate of the doctrine of the Christian trinity, December 8 1822]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms”
― Jean Cocteau

“Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“A pastor friend of mine said, "Our problem is that we no longer have martyrs. We only have celebrities.”
― Shane Claiborne

“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 wholesome.

The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Oh Lion in a peculiar guise,
Sharp Roman road to Paradise,
Come eat me up, I'll pay thy toll
With all my flesh, and keep my soul.”
― Stevie Smith, Modern Classics Selected Poems Of Stevie Smith

“In all times, and all countries especially in those countries which are divided within by religious faith, there are always fanatics who will be well contented to be regarded as martyrs.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

“سماعاً بني العرب الاكرمين ... اُباة التواني حماة الذمم
أفيقوا فمن نام عن حقه... عراه الأذى ولواه العدم
رعى الله شعباً يريد العلى... ويطلبها تحت خفق العلم
إذا لم نقم قومة حرة... ونرجع عهدا طواه القدم
فأين الفخار الذي ندعي... وأين الإباء وأين الكرم
فتى الشعر هذا مجال قرير... فنادي الإباء ونادي الشيم
ونادي الشباب كبار النفوس... ونادي الشباب عماد الأمم
فلا أمل اليوم إلا بهم... لأن الشباب عماد الأمم
وقل لبني العُرب لا تيأسوا... فإن الهموم ستحُي الهمم
وإن المقام على الضيم عار... ولا يغسل العار إلا بدم
ولابد من نهضة للعلى...بها ترفع العرب ذاك العلم”
― عمر حمد, ديوان الشهيد عمر حمد

“However , it’s over, and I’ll take no revenge on his folly – I can afford to suffer anything, hereafter! Should the meanest thing alive slap me on the cheek, I’d not only turn the other, but I’d ask pardon for provoking it – and, as proof, I’ll go make my peace with Edgar instantly – Good night – I’m an angel!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“The pages of history are red with the blood of illuminated "saints" who were murdered by their religions for actually achieving the advertised spiritual rewards.”
― Christopher S. Hyatt, Sex Magic, Tantra & Tarot: The Way of the Secret Lover

“We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“Rizal learned the right ideas at the wrong time, and for this he was shot.”
― Ambeth Ocampo, Rizal Without the Overcoat

“I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.”
― Hannah Senesh, Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary, the First Complete Edition

“They would martyr me themselves to satisfy their hunger for a saint.”
― Margaret Rogerson, Vespertine

“We hope someday to be saints, but not martyrs”
― Mario Puzo, The Last Don

“There's nothing holy about suffering. The stories of the martyrs illustrate their faith because in spite of what they endured they did not suffer. A saint always dies smiling.”
― Julia Gfrörer, Laid Waste

“The agony of martyrdom is almost too much to bear. In the early hours, when the loss is fresh, there is no comfort in knowing Glory will live on. We speak of the martyrs in History but we cannot know the actual pain they suffered in their final living hours. They enter the realm of the mythic, but we must never forget these were men like ourselves. When their flesh is torn, they cry out. They suffer as you or I would suffer, although more bravely. Remember Christ. Although I am now an enemy to Joseph's legacy, I shudder when recalling his pain.”
― David Ebershoff, The 19th Wife

“हुँदैन बिहान मिर्मिरेमा तारा झरेर नगए
बन्दैन मुलुक दुई-चार सपूत मरेर नगए”
― Bhupi Sherchan, घुम्ने मेचमाथि अन्धो मान्छे [Ghumne Mech Mathi Andho Manche]

“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

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”
― Tertullian

“Martyrdom, the fanaticism of being willing to die for one's beliefs, is the essential ingredient in making others want to follow the code left behind by that sacrificial example.”
― Stewart Stafford

“When time changes, the law also changes to suit the new rulers. Often the same people who were being accused of heinous crimes like treason according to the then laws, become the martyrs and messiahs when the laws are changed.”
― Awdhesh Singh, 31 Ways to Happiness

“The rulers of the world were Monks, when they could not be Martyrs.”
― John Henry Newman

“Believers, in order to sound spiritual or godly, will say they are willing to die for Christ. While this may sound noble, what God is really looking for are people who are willing to live for Christ.”
― Sebastien Richard, Kingdom Fundamentals: What the Kingdom of God Means and What it Means for You | A Thorough and Biblical Exposition of the Kingdom of Heaven as Preached by Jesus

“We simply do not know how many Christians suffered imprisonment or died at the hands of the authorities: possibly hundreds of people, although almost certainly not many thousands.

We do know that, in the end, the Christians came out on top.

Constantine converted, and with one brief exception all the emperors to follow were Christian. There would never again be an official Roman persecution of the Christians.

Throughout these early centuries of on-again, off-again opposition, Christians were not always bullied, beaten, tortured, and executed.

Most of the time, in most places, they were simply left in peace. Many Christians went from cradle to grave without facing any public ridicule, opposition, or persecution.

We do not hear much about these Christians for an obvious reason: peace and quiet rarely make it into the history books.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World

“In the Jewish hypogæum and subterranean cell at Rome, was little observable beside the variety of lamps and frequent draughts of Anthony and Jerome we meet with thigh-bones and death's-heads; but the cemeterial cells of ancient Christians and martyrs were filled with draughts of Scripture stories; not declining the flourishes of cypress, palms, and olive, and the mystical figures of peacocks, doves, and cocks; but iterately affecting the portraits of Enoch, Lazarus, Jonas, and the vision of Ezekiel, as hopeful draughts, and hinting imagery of the resurrection, which is the life of the grave, and sweetens our habitations in the land of moles and pismires.”
― Thomas Browne, Urne Burial

“For it is the property of those who expect to obtain mercy by prayer and sacrifices, to cease from and repent of their sins.”
― Justin Martyr, Hortatory Address to the Greeks

“Inciting Justice by Stewart Stafford

They stretched his neck out,
On the noose of his ancestors,
Bloodied and tattered, he died,
No invader fealty in martyr veins.

The rope, a country's pendulum,
Faces of stone from onlookers,
A witch-hunt's hysteria spreads,
Mourner's rain fell with temerity.

A snowball in a regime's eyes now,
Is the next day's roaring avalanche,
More then take up arms to fight on,
And raise the oppressor's gauntlet.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“But even though there be scandals from within and persecution from without, the members of His Kingdom need never fear that it will perish--for He has founded it upon a Rock against which the gates of hell cannot prevail, and He will be with it all days even to the consummation of the world.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, The Mystical Body of Christ

“It seemed the whole district of them was out, playing, flouncing, and at first glance they appeared mainly to resemble chandeliers with added lusciousness such as golden brocade and embossed wallpaper. By the time I did go out, all the streets were overrun with them: beribboned, besilked, bevelveted, behighheeled, bescratchy-petticoated and in pairs or else alone but pretending to be in pairs, waltzing and periodically crashing over. Meanwhile, the little boys, oblivious of the little girls, temporarily too, suspending operations against that army from "over there" - owing, probably, to the current absence of that army from "over there" - were taking turns at being good guy in their new play of the latest martyr killed recently in the political problems: Renouncer Hero Milkman, shadowed, set upon, then gunned down in their usual cowardly fashion by that murder squad spawned by a terrorist state.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman