Martyrdom

(188 votes)   What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Thomas Jefferson
1743-1826, Third President of the USA

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(165 votes)   It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Horace Mann
1796-1859, American Educator

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(149 votes)   The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(121 votes)   The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(116 votes)   No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Oscar Wilde
1856-1900, British Author, Wit

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(112 votes)   The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Soren Kierkegaard
1813-1855, Danish Philosopher, Writer

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(107 votes)   We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.

T. S. Eliot
1888-1965, American-born British Poet, Critic

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(102 votes)   While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

John B. S. Haldane
1892-1964, British Scientist, Author

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(100 votes)   No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

E. M. Cioran
1911-, Rumanian-born French Philosopher

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(97 votes)   There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Patrick Henry Pearse
1879-1916, Irish Nationalist Leader

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(96 votes)   I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

John Mason Brown
1800-1859, American Militant Abolitionist

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(83 votes)   I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Gabriel Peri
French Communist Leader

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(83 votes)   Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Bishop Hugh Latimer
1485-1555, British Churchman, Protestant Martyr

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(77 votes)   Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Arthur Schnitzler

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(76 votes)   Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

E. M. Cioran
1911-, Rumanian-born French Philosopher

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