Martyrdom Quotes

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

E. M. Cioran

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

E. M. Cioran

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Indira Gandhi

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

John Mason Brown

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Florence Nightingale

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

Albert Camus

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 your life?

Christopher Hitchens

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Horace Mann

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Thomas Jefferson

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Gabriel Peri

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

J.B.S. Haldane

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Soren Kierkegaard

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Oscar Wilde

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Bishop Hugh Latimer

If you go and talk to most people, they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth on education, of knowledge of understanding what the real issues are and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they are supposed to think and they keep repeating that until pretty soon they say, 'Oh, well that must be true.'

Benjamin Carson

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Nathaniel Howe

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Albert Camus