Edward R. Murrow Quotes

In corporation [corporate] religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right.

Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.

A heretic can be tolerated. But a heresy cannot.

If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him.

The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church.

We need more people speaking out. This country is not overrun with rebels and free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep and conformists.

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

Heretics are no longer burned at the stake. But they are marginalized by cultural and educational institutions.

He who departs from consensus is not an infidel.

The tale is one of an evil time, When souls were fettered and thought was crime, And heresy's whisper above its breath Meant shameful scourging and bonds and death!

We condemn you, Michael Servetus, to be bound and taken to Champel and there attached to a stake and burned with your book to ashes.

A single friar who goes counter to all Christianity for a thousand years must be wrong.

Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy, and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.

The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.

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.

Every ideological movement hates the breakaway, the traitor.

No orthodox church ever had power that it did not endeavor to make people think its way by force and flame.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels

Note the startling regularity through history with which society martyrs the rebel in one generation and worships him in the next.

Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

We've always been a nation of heretics.

The moment you start asking questions, you become public enemy number one.

When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.