Famous quotes containing the words eastern, catholic, victims, soviet, persecutions, suppression, churches and/or stalin:
“Your Beauty, ripe, and calm, and fresh,
As Eastern Summers are,
Must now, forsaking Time and Flesh,
Add light to some small Star.”
—Sir William Davenant (1606–1668)
“Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.”
—Erica Jong (b. 1942)
“Men are not philosophers, but are rather very foolish children, who, by reason of their partiality, see everything in the most absurd manner, and are the victims at all times of the nearest object. There is even no philosopher who is a philosopher at all times. Our experience, our perception is conditioned by the need to acquire in parts and in succession, that is, with every truth a certain falsehood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Nothing an interested foreigner may have to say about the Soviet Union today can compare with the scorn and fury of those who inhabit the ruin of a dream.”
—Christopher Hope (b. 1944)
“... so far from entrenching human conduct within the gentle barriers of peace and love, religion has ever been, and now is, the deepest source of contentions, wars, persecutions for conscience sake, angry words, angry feelings, backbitings, slanders, suspicions, false judgments, evil interpretations, unwise, unjust, injurious, inconsistent actions.”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit.... A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“The law of God is a law of change, and ... when the Churches set themselves against change as such, they are setting themselves against the law of God.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“It was the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)