“Above all, we cannot and should not try to distance ourselves from any of these inquisitions by reassuring ourselves that no abuse of 'moral justice' could occur in the American democracy.” — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
“No offense against moral order was too trivial to escape the attention of the Spanish Inquisition.” — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
“Like the victims of the historical Inquisition and its other modern equivalents, the men and women who were targeted during the McCarthy era were… — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
“Above all, we cannot and should not try to distance ourselves from any of these inquisitions by reassuring ourselves that no abuse of 'moral… — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
“Precisely because the Inquisition provides a blueprint for building and operating the machinery of persecution...the Inquisition was and still is a danger to human… — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
“The persecutorial impulse - 'the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings as imagined agents of corruption… — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
“...human beings as a species have never failed to find reasons to regard one another with fear and loathing and thus to offer violence… — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
“Once available, the inquisitorial toolbox could be put to use by any authoritarian regime with the will and the means to unpack and use… — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
“...free-associative sexual libel...is typical of the impulses of religious authoritarians to demonize all heretics by attributing to them every manner of outrage that a… — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
“All the weaponry and tactics that have been deployed in the war on terror are justified by precisely the same theological stance once invoked… — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
“What Hitler and Stalin had in common was the same aspiration that animated the first inquisitors - the simple but deadly notion that it… — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
“...the workings of the Inquisition did not fundamentally change over its six-hundred-year history. The Inquisition was a machine with interchangeable parts, just as its… — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
“Indeed, the greatest single innovation of the Spanish Inquisition was to turn heresy from a thought-crime into a blood-crime...” — Jonathan Kirsch Copy Share Image
