Heresy Quotes

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

Albert Einstein

The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper.

Aleister Crowley, The Confession

If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practised, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.

Ezra Pound, Interview in Writers

I have always been on the side of the heretics, against those who burned them, because the heretics so often turned out to be right....Dead, but right.

Edward R. Murrow

A heresy can spring only from a system that is in full vigor.

Eric Hoffer

A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.

John Milton

A virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian

Benjamin Franklin

The difference between heresy and prophecy is often one of sequence. Heresy often turns out to have been prophecy -- when properly aged.

Hubert Humphrey

It may be you fear more to deliver judgment upon me than I fear judgment.

Giordano Bruno

For my name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

Francis Bacon