#heretic

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#heresy #heretics #literature #art

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. (“Tomorrow”) ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#heresy #heretics #tolstoy #faith

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#bitter #entropy #heretics #human #human thought

I once saw the world’s ugliest baby drown. But then I realized, “That’s not a baby, that’s a log. And it’s not drowning, it’s burning.” I wonder what it did to deserve that? It was probably a heretic. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#burn #drown #funny #heretic #ugly

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. ↗

— John Shelby Spong

#burning #demonic #get #heretics #need

A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes. ↗

— Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

#heretic #his #man #own #sees

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#better #cannot #dead #distinguish #eyes

If I were a Roman Catholic, I should turn a heretic, in sheer desperation, because I would rather go to heaven than go to purgatory. ↗

— Charles Spurgeon

#catholic #desperation #go #heaven #heretic

I can understand why Christians call us heretics. But most important, who will God call a heretic? From God's point of view, my revelation is deeply orthodox. ↗

— Sun Myung Moon

#christians #deeply #god #heretic #heretics

One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#atheism #curses #heretics #hiwi-al-balkhi #irony