History Quote by Jonathan Kirsch

“No offense against moral order was too trivial to escape the attention of the Spanish Inquisition.”

— Jonathan Kirsch

“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

“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

“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

“...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

“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

“...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

“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

“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

“...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

“Indeed, the greatest single innovation of the Spanish Inquisition was to turn heresy from a thought-crime into a blood-crime...”

— Jonathan Kirsch

“Interrogation...was the highest art of the inquisitor.”

— Jonathan Kirsch