“The persecutorial impulse - 'the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings as imagined agents of corruption and incarnations of evil' - seems to be hardwired into Western civilization.” — 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
