C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Persecution
Persecution is not wrong because it is cruel; but it is cruel because it is wrong.
A religion which requires persecution to sustain it is of the devil’s propagation.
Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant.
The way of this world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.
Whoever is right, the persecutor must be wrong.
A desire to resist persecution is implanted in the nature of man.
The history of persecution is a history of endeavor to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.
Persecution to persons in a high rank stands them in the stead of eminent virtue.
Persecution is disobeying the most solemn injunction of Christianity, under the sham plea of upholding it.
Wherever you see persecution, there is more than a probability that truth lies on the persecuted side.
Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.
It is an inherent and inseparable inconvenience in persecution that it knows not where to stop.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Persecution often does in this life what the last day will do completely—separate the wheat from the tares.
The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.
There are only two things in which the false professors of all religions have agreed—to persecute all other sects and to plunder their own.
It is iniquitous, unjust, and most impolitic to persecute for religion’s sake. It is against natural religion, revealed religion, and sound policy.
It has become a settled principle that nothing which is good and true can be destroyed by persecution, but that the effect ultimately is to establish more firmly, and to spread more widely, that which it was designed to overthrow. It has long since passed into a proverb that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”
In that disputable point of persecuting men for conscience sake, I see such dreadful consequences rising, I would be as fully convinced of the truth of it as a mathematical demonstration, before I would venture to act upon it or make it a part of my religion.