Burned At The Stake Quotes & Sayings

I think if I had lived back in Salem, I would have been burned at the stake — Rose McGowan

The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence humans have ever committed. — Gil Bailie

Different kinds of crazy hurt in similar ways, like being stoned to death versus being burned at the stake. — Hymn Herself

No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever. — Daniel J. Boorstin

[Before being burned at the stake for her faith:] Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames. — Joan Of Arc

Willow: (on her Halloween costume): I'm Joan of Arc. I figured we had a lot in common, seeing as how I was almost burned at the stake. And plus she had that close relationship with God. Xander: [to Oz] And you are ... ? [Oz shows a name tag that says 'GOD'] Xander: Of course. Wish I'd thought of that before I put down my deposit. I could've been God. Oz: Blasphemer. — Joss Whedon

They learned that Catholics burned Protestants at the stake, and it came as a shock if they ever found out that Protestants did the same to Catholics whenever they got the chance. — Ken Follett

I often feel I am being burned at the stake just because I have always refused to give up that wonderful strange power I have inside me that becomes manifested when I am in harmonious communication with some other inspired being. — Leonora Carrington

Well, the man who first translated the bible into English was burned at the stake, and they've been at it ever since. Must be all that adultery, murder and incest. But not to worry. It's back on the shelves. — Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Even from far away, I could see people being chased by hellhounds, burned at the stake, forced to run naked through cactus patches or listen to opera music. — Rick Riordan

I'm a fundamentalist in the true sense. That is to say, I follow the fundamentals of religion ... But for over 1,400 years people have been interpreting and re-interpreting the religion to suit their own purpose! ... These [extremist and terrorist acts] are not Islamic fundamentals any more than the Christians who burned people at the stake are fundamentalist. They are actually deviating from the teachings of the religion! — Mahathir Mohamad

His story is colored by the murder of a brother, the rape of a sister, the betrayal of a friend, the pounding of nails into flesh and bone, and the darkening of the sky. A world of what-ifs and could-have-beens, peopled by has-beens and might-have-beens. It is a world soaked in fear and drenched by the blood of a million martyrs. A world of men burned at the stake and babes slaughtered at their mother's breasts. A dark history with pain oozing into all its hidden corners. At the center of history is a death. Christ's death, the decisive point of history. Christianity is perhaps the most morbid religion of the world. Perpetually meditating upon death with little crosses hung around their necks, Christian disciples sing their way to martyrdom. Anticipating death and calling it gain, Christians are evangelists of the grotesque. The very hope of the Gospel rests directly upon our ability to imagine a world in which suffering serves as the soil from which resurrection springs. — Ben Palpant

I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if I must take the orthodoxy with peace and quiet. — Harriet Martineau

A thousand years ago, scientists who wondered about consciousness and the nature of reality were burned at the stake. We still haven't recovered from that and it's left us with a culture that no longer investigates consciousness, except on the fringes. — David O. Russell

The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from the window and escaped across the castle's ice-covered moat. A guard gave chase. Willems made it safely to the other side. The guard did not, falling through the ice into the freezing water, and Willems stopped, went back, and pulled his pursuer to safety. For his act of compassion, he was taken back to prison, tortured, and then burned slowly at the stake as he repeated "Oh, my Lord, my God" seventy times over.8 — Malcolm Gladwell

back in the middle ages
they burned unruly women at the stake
and out of the ashes of their bones and flesh
rose the Enlightenment and Reason fresh
and the white men declared
there's no such thing as witches
they're just crazy psycho-bitches
but we certainly can't let them run free
lock 'em up and throw away the key
yeah they said: lock 'em up and throw away the key

cause there's nothing scarier than a woman mad and/or
aware of her own magic
tragic how much violence is done
in the name of science
to ensure our silence

in Victorian times they located suffering in our uterus
in the blood in the soft internal organs
took our pain our righteous rage
they called it 'hysteria'
and then Dr. Freud ignored women's horror stories
herstories of abuse and rape and
took a justified hatred of the penis and called it
envy (he sold more books that way) — Leah Harris

Questioning the status quo can result in banishment, imprisonment, ridicule or being burned at the stake, depending on your era, your locale, and the sacred cows you wish to butcher. — Gene Spafford

If you're too young to remember the Time Before Pong, then you probably can't appreciate the momentousness of its arrival. Bear in mind the game emerged in a very different world. It was a time before home computers, cable television, cell phones, game consoles, the Internet--everything we take for granted today. For many of my formative years, we still watched TV in black and white, and had to get up to change the channel. This was the technological Dark Ages. Had we been less culturally enlightened, we would have denounced Pong as witchcraft and burned its inventors at the stake. For those of us who were there--who had never played, let alone seen, a video game--we knew we were witnessing something extraordinary, a groundbreaking achievement in home entertainment. However, none of us knew that we were participating in the birth of a revolution. — Devin C. Griffiths

My husband tried to have me burned at the stake and you
brutalize your brothers on an hourly basis, which makes them not
want to be too close to you for very long. What does that tell you,
Briec the Arrogant?"
"That they're jealous of our greatness. — G.A. Aiken

... Faustus ... dared to confirm he had advanced beyond the level of a scarlet sinner - he was a conscious follower of the Prince of Darkness. The fact he could publicly project an Antichrist image with pride, having no fear of reprisal, and his seeming diabolical art of escaping all punishment when others who were considered heretics had burned at the stake for less, would certainly signal that an unnatural individual walked in their midst. It is true in many respects he assumed the role of the charlatan, yet how apropos, considering his willingness to follow his 'brother-in-law' known as the Father of Lies and deception. — E.A. Bucchianeri

For a second i was just a kid, a kid who had lived all his life in the same tiny town. Just a child, because i knew i would have to live a lot more, suffer a lot more, to ever understand the searing agony in Edwards eyes. He raised his hands as if to wipe sweat from his forehead, but his fingers scraped against his face like they were going to rip his granite skin right off. His black eyes burned in their sockets, out of focus, or seeing things that weren't there. His mouth opened like he was going to scream, but nothing came out. This was the face of a man who would if he were burning at the stake. — Stephenie Meyer

SHE TOLD THE TRUSTEES, who had surely vacationed in the Caribbean, about the Carib Indian chief who was about to be burned at the stake by Spaniards. His crime was his failure to see the beauty of his people's becoming slaves in their own country.
This chief was offered a cross to kiss before a professional soldier or maybe a priest set fire to the kindling and logs piled up above his kneecaps. He asked why he should kiss it, and he was told that the kiss would get him into Paradise, where he would meet God and so on.
He asked if there were more people like the Spaniards up there.
He was told that of course there were.
In that case, he said, he would leave the cross unkissed. He said he didn't want to go to yet another place where people were so cruel. — Kurt Vonnegut

Anger has been a really big deal for women: how can we express it without feeling that, as the physically weaker sex, we won't get killed. The alpha-woman was burned at the stake and had her head chopped off in days of old. — Alanis Morissette

Christians have been beaten, whipped, starved, humiliated, mutilated, tortured, hung, burned at the stake, crucified, and fed to lions; yet two thousand years after a man called Jesus of Nazareth walked the streets of Jerusalem, 1,734 million people alive on this earth today call themselves by the ever-dividing, ever-uniting word: Christian. God is still scattering the seeds a few righteous renegades planted in a city called Antioch. Had they only known what they were starting. — Beth Moore

In the days of Moses and the prophets such a man would have been counted among the wise men of the land; in the Middle Ages he would have been burned at the stake. — Hans Christian Andersen

Had Nietzsche lived to be burned at the stake by outraged Mississippi Methodists, it would have been a glorious day for his doctrines. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a place in the United States for the Negro. They are real American citizens, and at home. They have fought and bled and died, like men, to make this country what it is. And if they have got to suffer and die, and be lynched, and tortured, and burned at the stake, I say they are at home. — Amanda Smith

It was only after oral tales became written orthodoxies that some people were labeled "pagans" and "heretics" and burned at the stake for unorthodox views. The greatest strength media ecology possesses is its ability to generate unorthodox views. Media ecology makes a better "Trojan horse" than a golden bull. — Peter K. Fallon

In the sequence where I am burned at the stake, everything was so casual and hazardous that the bottom of my dress caught fire, and the grips became hysterical as they tried to pull me off the stake. — Barbara Steele

There are those who say we must rescind the Golan Heights law that was passed in the Knesset. To rescind is a concept from the days of the Inquisition. Our forefathers were burned at the stake and would not rescind their faith. — Menachem Begin

I also wish to be ... noble. Profoundly noble. I wish to devote myself to a cause. I want to be part of something. I want to swing into action, like a one-woman army. An arm-me ... But I don't want to be noble and committed like most women in history were
which invariably seems to involve being burned at the stake, dying of sadness, or being bricked up in a tower by an earl. I don't want to sacrifice myself for something. I don't want to die for something. I don't even want to walk in the rain up a hill in a skirt that's sticking to my thighs for something. I want to live for something, instead
as men do. I want to have fun. The most fun ever. — Caitlin Moran

In Shakespeare's day it was women who were being burned at the stake as witches ... not men. The men were thought of as alchemists. But women doing the same thing would be a witch and would be burned. — Helen Mirren

It is called Giordano Bruno after the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic scholar who held that there are an infinity of worlds and that many are inhabited. For this and other crimes he was burned at the stake in the year 1600. — Carl Sagan

In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being timid. I clearly would have been burned at the stake in another age. — Thomas Gold

I believe in all the qualities of being a liberal. I keep going back to all the great social events in our country's history, starting with the Salem witch trials, where the conservative view was that they're witches and should be burned at the stake, and the liberal view was there's no such thing as witches. — George Clooney

There could not be a manor house. There had never been a manor house anywhere near Lostfarthing. Nobles did not come to Lostfarthing. It was not possible for a noble to disgrace themselves badly enough to be exiled this far east. The Duke of Entwood had been convicted of black magic, cannibalism, and high treason, and while he'd been burned at the stake, his heirs had only been sent as far east as Blue Lady, which was still two day's travel west of Skypepper. — T. Kingfisher

The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of tortures to their tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did. — Henry David Thoreau

For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition kills its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still on repentant; in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory along to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. — George Orwell

One with God is always a majority. But many have been burned at the stake while the boats were being counted. Thomas Reed — H.W. Brands

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself. — Naguib Mahfouz

Struggles among Roman patricians, plebeians, and slaves produced a version of the chordal triad universalized around a notion of libertas. Different notes of the chord were dominant from the Republic to the Empire. The slave's point of view was made prominent in the figure of Epictetus, one of the few major Roman theorists born a slave. By the Middle Ages, freedom had attained a spiritual dimension but was still linked to the political. With medieval Christendom came the triumph of the sovereignal conception of freedom. That triumph coincided with theocratic societal decadence, the doctrine of heresy, the transformation of mass slavery into the political language of serfdom, and the introduction of the root word Slav to refer to serfs across Europe. Heretics privileged their personal freedom over sovereign orthodoxy. Being burned at the stake was a consequence. — Neil Roberts

Your failure is measured by your aspirations. Aspire not, and you cannot fail. Columbus died in chains. Joan or Arc was burned at the stake. Let us all live snugly -- and life will soon be little more than a thick, gelatinous stream of comfortability and ignorance. — Myles Connolly

Christ is not God, not the saviour of the world, but a mere man, a sinful man and an abominable idol. All who worship him are abominable idolaters and Christ did not rise again from death to life nor did he ascend into heaven. — Matthew Hammond

All my games were political games; I was, like Joan of Arc, perpetually being burned at the stake. — Indira Gandhi

Maybe you who condemn me are in greater fear than I who am condemned. — Giordano Bruno

We've got to deal with the fact that the church has been violently prejudiced against gay people. We've murdered them; we've burned them at the stake; we've run them out of town for something over which they have no control. And that's immoral. — John Shelby Spong

Everyone hates a martyr; it's no wonder martyrs were burned at the stake. — E.W. Howe

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities. — Alice Walker

Guillaume Belibaste, the last Cathar recorded to have burned at the stake in 1321, is said to have prophesied that "at the end of seven hundred years the laurel would again turn green,"114 implying that the principles of "the true Christianity" would return to the world's attention. — Marnia Robinson

It's never the man who is shamed and ruined. It's always the woman - the other woman - who gets burned at the stake." And — Emma Chase

I'll thank you to remember that not so many years ago men were burned at the stake just for saying the earth went round the sun! — James Clavell

Perspective gets lost in moral certainties. Which only means that no one was ever burned at the stake by a doubter. — Thomas H. Cook

It's always fire with Baz. I can't believe he hasn't incinerated me yet. Or burned me at the stake. — Rainbow Rowell

It was Christians, you know, not Pagans, who were responsible for the Holocaust. It was Christians, not Pagans, who lynched people here in the South, who burned people at the stake, frequently in the name of this Jesus Christ. — Desmond Tutu

The world never burned a casual Christian at the stake. — John R. Rice

If you have to be burned at the stake, be a good fellow and collect your own fire-wood. — George Ade

One of the things that always fascinated me about the Renaissance was that it was a time both of great scientific discovery and also of superstition and belief in magic. And so it was a period in which Galileo invented the telescope, but also a time when hundreds were burned at the stake because people thought they were witches. — Marie Rutkoski

It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia. — Donella Meadows

This girl at 17 really led an army, this girl at 19 really burned at the stake by her own choice. And you sit there and you want to figure out why did she make these choices? How did she live such a life? — Leelee Sobieski

In 1487 alone, two hundred heretics had-in one of the greatest euphemisms in the history of language-"relaxed," that is, burned at the stake.
Dogs of God, Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors — James Reston Jr.

Some ancients speculated that the stars were small holes in a black sphere through which distant light shone through. The Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno suggested that they were instead objects like our Sun, just much farther away, perhaps with their own planets and civilizations - this didn't go down too well with the Catholic Church, which had him burned at the stake in 1600. — Max Tegmark

It's very worrying at this time in the world that any point of view should be prohibited, that's banned, there are heretics that should be burned at the stake. — Thabo Mbeki

Well he should get over himself. He tried to get me burned at the stake in Brit History yesterday. Here I am minding my own business like a good little girl, and out of the blue Tucker raises his hand and accuses me of being a witch"
"sounds like something Tucker would do" admits wendy.
"Everybody had to vote on it. I barely escaped with my nuns life. Obviously I'll have to return the favour. — Cynthia Hand