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Inquisition Quotes

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Inquisition Quotes

“Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious.”

ReasonPhilosophyFreedomEducationDoctrineCatholicismPersecutionRationalityGood SenseSchoolingFreedom Of ThoughtInquisitionFreedom Of ReligionIndependent Thought
Book:The Dream of Scipio
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“He hated the Inquisition and what it had done to the Spains. He found it logical that the Church should want to safeguard the doctrines that empowered it, but at what cost? Thousands upon thousands had been tortured, hundreds upon hundreds had died in agony, tens of thousands had been banished from the land. A whole society had been upended. But preserving the Faith was only part of it. The war for the crown of Castile, in which his family had been slaughtered, plus the war in Grenada–the whole Reconquista, in fact–had bankrupted the monarchy. Banishing the Jews and Moors did more than make the Spains a Christian realm. It left the abandoned properties to be looted by the Church and the royal treasury–an equal share between them. The same with heretics: the Church and the treasury divided their property and money down the middle. Wealth and power–the two Holy Grails of Church and state.”

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Book:The Compendium of Srem
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“What did the torturers of the Inquisition want? The admission of evil, of the principle of evil. It was necessary to make the accused say that he was not guilty except by accident, through the incidence of the principle of Evil in the divine order. Thus confession restored a reassuring causality, and torture, and the extermination of evil through torture, were nothing but the triumphal coronation (neither sadistic nor expiatory) of the fact of having produced Evil as cause. Otherwise, the least heresy would have rendered all of divine creation suspect.”

EvilConfessionSocial OrderSocial NormsInquisition
Book:Simulacra and Simulation
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“Частенько я завидую трем знаменитым фигуркам-обезьянкам. Тем самым... "Не вижу зла, не слышу зла, не говорю о зле". Я так не могу. Видя зло - я не могу закрыть глаза. Не могу назвать предательство - доблестью, а убийство - благом, даже если отчетливо сознаю необходимость этого. Таков тяжелый дар Посвящения, сделавшего меня Высоким Инквизитором. Моя броня, защищающая от лживых посул и соблазнов проникающих в наш мир демонов. Просто иногда эта броня слишком уж тяжело давит на плечи. Другие Ордена Церкви Столпов Света требуют от своих членов постов, целибата, ночных молений... да и много чего еще. Наш - всегда снисходительно относится к слабостям своих адептов. Мы едим мясо, пьем хмельное, путаемся с девушками нетяжелого поведения, почти не делая различий между бордельными девками, и высокородными девицами в поисках приключений... И все потому, что мы знаем - когда мы увидим зло, то не сможем отвернуться. Не сможем ему не противостоять. Не сможем закрыть глаза. Но иногда... и даже - почти всегда, зло приходится сокрушать злом. Демоны редко внемлют проповедям... а люди... люди бывают страшнее любых демонов. И тогда в ход идет не тихое увещевение, но Тяжкое слово и остро отточенный меч. И вот, чтобы лекарство не стало страшнее болезни - мы не можем закрыть глаза и на зло в себе.”

EvilInquisition
Book:Шиповник и ландыши
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“Killing, raping and looting have been common practices in religious societies, and often carried out with clerical sanction. The catalogue of notorious barbarities – wars and massacres, acts of terrorism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the chopping off of thieves’ hands, the slicing off of clitorises and labia majora, the use of gang rape as punishment, and manifold other savageries committed in the name of one faith or another — attests to religion’s longstanding propensity to induce barbarity, or at the very least to give it free rein. The Bible and the Quran have served to justify these atrocities and more, with women and gay people suffering disproportionately. There is a reason the Middle Ages in Europe were long referred to as the Dark Ages; the millennium of theocratic rule that ended only with the Renaissance (that is, with Europe’s turn away from God toward humankind) was a violent time. Morality arises out of our innate desire for safety, stability and order, without which no society can function; basic moral precepts (that murder and theft are wrong, for example) antedated religion. Those who abstain from crime solely because they fear divine wrath, and not because they recognize the difference between right and wrong, are not to be lauded, much less trusted. Just which practices are moral at a given time must be a matter of rational debate. The 'master-slave' ethos – obligatory obeisance to a deity — pervading the revealed religions is inimical to such debate. We need to chart our moral course as equals, or there can be no justice.”

WarGodDesireReligionFaithOrderReligiousJusticeSocietyCrimeDivineMoralityBibleSafetyKillingEqualityTerrorismDebateStabilityJustificationDark AgesRenaissanceQuranImmoralityCrusadesInquisitionSavageryMassacreTheocracyThe BibleLootingRapingGenital MutilationThe QuranMoral Precepts
Author:Jeffrey Tayler
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“After hundreds of years, if there were so many sinners left, what had the Inquisition accomplished? They might root out Jews and Muslims and Erasmists and alumbrados, but then what was left? The machine had been built to consume heresy and impiety, so would it simply keep finding heresy and impiety to feed on? Valentina's soul certainly hadn't been saved. The vicar's threats hadn't made her good, only scared--and not of purgatory. All this spectacle, all this misery, and she didn't fear hell more than being shut up in a house with her lawful husband.”

FearInquisitionPurgatory
Book:The Familiar
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“Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond (this, truly, diabolical) is established between you and him ... These things I know, Ubertino; I also have belonged to those groups of men who believe they can produce the truth with white-hot iron. Well, let me tell you, the white heat of truth comes from another flame.”

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Book:The Name of the Rose
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“That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion. You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, 'This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children.' Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue. That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. 'What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.”

ChristianSufferingProgressMoralityDogmaFactCatholic ChurchInquisitionMoral ProgressChristian ReligionDogmatic Belief
Book:Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
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“Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse. Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.”

UniverseDepressionDiversityIntellectualDignitySocial MediaAuthorMysticismInclusionOffensiveEquityPublishOutrageEccentricDisrespectAlchemyObsessiveParanoidUnstableTwitterLawsPsychoticInquisitionAwkwardnessManiaBacklashExpulsionCryptographyMoodsIsaac NewtonStutterAsperger SVirtue SignallingAsperger S SyndromeAsperger SyndromeLiterary AgentTime TravellingClickbaitVirtue SignalSpeech CodesTime Jump
Author:Geoffrey Miller
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“In repressing and censoring the literary genre specifically invented to give "the necessity of lying" a place in the world, the Inquisitors achieved exactly the opposite of what they wanted. Theirs was a world without novels, yes, but also a world into which fiction had spread and contaminated practically everything: history, religion, poetry, science, art, speeches, journalism, and the daily habits of people.”

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Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
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“We still are victims, in Latin America, of what we could call 'the revenge of the novel.' We still have great difficulty in our countries in differentiating between fiction and reality. We are traditionally accustomed to mix them in such a way that this is, probably, one of the reasons why we are so impractical and inept in political matters, for instance. But some good came also from this novelization of our whole life. Books such as Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Cortázar's short stories, and Roa Bastos's novels would not have been possible otherwise.”

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Author:Mario Vargas Llosa
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“We sometimes think, and even like to think, that the two greatest exertions that have influenced mankind, religion and science, have always been historical enemies, intriguing us in opposite directions. But this effort at special identity is loudly false. It is not religion but the church and science that were hostile to each other. And it was rivalry, not contravention. Both were religious. They were two giants fuming at each other over the same ground. Both proclaimed to be the only way to divine revelation.”

InquisitionScience Vs Religion1976Church PoliticsThe Auguries Of Science
Book:The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
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“To Judaism Christians ascribe the glory of having been the first religion to teach a pure monotheism. But monotheism existed long before the Jews attained to it. Zoroaster and his earliest followers were monotheists, dualism being a later development of the Persian theology. The adoption of monotheism by the Jews, which occurred only at a very late period in their history, was not, however, the result of a divine revelation, or even of an intellectual superiority, for the Jews were immeasurably inferior intellectually to the Greeks and Romans, to the Hindus and Egyptians, and to the Assyrians and Babylonians, who are supposed to have retained a belief in polytheism. This monotheism of the Jews has chiefly the result of a religious intolerance never before equaled and never since surpassed, except in the history of Christianity and Mohammedanism, the daughters of Judaism. Jehovistic priests and kings tolerated no rivals of their god and made death the penalty for disloyalty to him. The Jewish nation became monotheistic for the same reason that Spain, in the clutches of the Inquisition, became entirely Christian.”

IslamIntoleranceGodsJudaismSpainRevelationJehovahInquisitionJewsDualismReligious IntoleranceMonotheismEgyptiansRomansPolytheismGreeksHindusZoroastrianismAssyriansPersian TheologyZoroasterBabyloniansMohammedanism
Book:Christ
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“It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on.”

HistoryTorturePersecutionWitchesProtestantsTalibanInquisitionJewsMonotheismReligious PersecutionCatholicsHereticsPuritans
Author:Philip Pullman
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“The liberty of man is not safe in the hands of any church. Wherever the Bible and sword are in partnership, man is a slave. All laws for the purpose of making man worship God, are born of the same spirit that kindled the fires of the auto da fe, and lovingly built the dungeons of the Inquisition. All laws defining and punishing blasphemy -- making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the Bible, or to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, or to enjoy yourself on the Sabbath, or to give your opinion of Jehovah, were passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once repealed by honest men. An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going in partnership with State Legislatures. Certainly he ought not so to act that laws become necessary to keep him from being laughed at. No one thinks of protecting Shakespeare from ridicule, by the threat of fine and imprisonment. It strikes me that God might write a book that would not necessarily excite the laughter of his children. In fact, I think it would be safe to say that a real God could produce a work that would excite the admiration of mankind.”

InspirationLawReligionPoliticsSeparation Of Church And StateJehovahInquisition
Book:Some Mistakes of Moses
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“The number of innocents killed by Leftist movements dwarfs the numbers killed by any other movement in a comparable period of time at any time in history, and certainly in the modern world. The Church, a favorite target of the Left, hardly competes. For example, in its nearly five hundred years of existence the Inquisition killed approximately five thousand people. And that ended more than five hundred years ago, when barbarity was the norm.”

InquisitionThe Left
Book:Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph
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“In the 1600s, the Peruvian Inquisition targeted wise Quechua and Aymara women, who kept the indigenous religion alive and often acted to empower their communities and protect them from colonial heads and officials. In 1591, the Brazilian Inquisition prosecuted the Portuguese witch Maria Gonçalves (also known as Burn-tail) for sexual witchcraft and for making powders from forest herbs. She challenged the bishop, saying that, if he preached from the pulpit, she preached from the cadeira (priestess chair).”

InquisitionWise WomenPeruQuechuaAymaraMaria GonçalvesSexual Witchcraft
Book:Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!
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“American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it.”

Cold WarInquisitionMccarthyismRed ScareHuacBlacklist
Author:Archibald MacLeish
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“Ignatov: "...History has shown charm to be the final ambition of the leisure class. What I do find surprising is that the author of the poem in question could have become a man so obviously without purpose. " Rostov: "I have lived under the impression that a man's purpose is known only to God." Ignatov: "Indeed. How convenient that must have been for you.”

SarcasmInquisitionReparteeBattle Of WitsWitty ComebacksRejoinder
Book:A Gentleman in Moscow
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“No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal—but they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell.”

DoctorsMedicineOld AgeSurgeryRenaissanceInquisition200616th Century
Book:The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
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“Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, made a comment that sounds almost prophetic now: that the happy, primitive society (which, by the way, never existed) is lost for all those who have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, Popper warns, the more certainly we will reach the Inquisition, the secret police, and a romanticized gangsterism. But once the existential problems of the individual, who is good by nature, can be blamed on the "evil" society, nothing stands in the way of sheer imagination. The definition of the benevolent society free of all power is only a question of fantasy.”

InquisitionSecret Police
Author:Paul Watzlawick
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“Remembering that only a few years ago men, women, and even children, were imprisoned, tortured and burned, for having expressed in an exceedingly mild and gentle way, the ideas entertained by me, I congratulate myself that calumny is now the pulpit's last resort. The old instruments of torture are kept only to gratify curiosity; the chains are rusting away, and the demolition of time has allowed even the dungeons of the Inquisition to be visited by light. The church, impotent and malicious, regrets, not the abuse, but the loss of her power, and seeks to hold by falsehood what she gained by cruelty and force, by fire and fear. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow grass-grown path that leads to heaven. Such a religion is necessarily uncompromising, unreasoning, aggressive and insolent. Christianity has held all other creeds and forms in infinite contempt, divided the world into enemies and friends, and verified the awful declaration of its founder—a declaration that wet with blood the sword he came to bring, and made the horizon of a thousand years lurid with the fagots' flames.”

IdeasTimeReligionForceHeavenFearPeaceChurchLossChristianityOpinionPowerFireAtheismRegretFriendsBibleAbuseInspiredCrueltyTortureDivisionContemptSaviorAggressiveCreedsFalsehoodBurnedDeclarationEnemiesPulpitInquisitionMaliciousSwordInsolentDungeonImprisonImpotent
Book:Some Mistakes of Moses
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“If the Pentateuch be true, religious persecution is a duty. The dungeons of the Inquisition were temples, and the clank of every chain upon the limbs of heresy was music in the ear of God. If the Pentateuch was inspired, every heretic should be destroyed; and every man who advocates a fact inconsistent with the sacred book, should be consumed by sword and flame. In the Old Testament no one is told to reason with a heretic, and not one word is said about relying upon argument, upon education, nor upon intellectual development—nothing except simple brute force. Is there to-day a christian who will say that four thousand years ago, it was the duty of a husband to kill his wife if she differed with him upon the subject of religion? Is there one who will now say that, under such circumstances, the wife ought to have been killed? Why should God be so jealous of the wooden idols of the heathen? Could he not compete with Baal? Was he envious of the success of the Egyptian magicians? Was it not possible for him to make such a convincing display of his power as to silence forever the voice of unbelief? Did this God have to resort to force to make converts? Was he so ignorant of the structure of the human mind as to believe all honest doubt a crime? If he wished to do away with the idolatry of the Canaanites, why did he not appear to them? Why did he not give them the tables of the law? Why did he only make known his will to a few wandering savages in the desert of Sinai? Will some theologian have the kindness to answer these questions? Will some minister, who now believes in religious liberty, and eloquently denounces the intolerance of Catholicism, explain these things; will he tell us why he worships an intolerant God? Is a god who will burn a soul forever in another world, better than a christian who burns the body for a few hours in this? Is there no intellectual liberty in heaven? Do the angels all discuss questions on the same side? Are all the investigators in perdition? Will the penitent thief, winged and crowned, laugh at the honest folks in hell? Will the agony of the damned increase or decrease the happiness of God? Will there be, in the universe, an eternal auto da fe?”

MindReasonGodChristianLawReligionUniverseForceHeavenWishEducationSilenceMusicChristianityKindnessPowerHellDoubtWifeMagicHonestCrimeDutyHusbandBibleArgumentEternityCatholicInspiredJewIntellectIgnorantFlamesTemplesCatholicismJealousInvestigationIntoleranceLaughEgyptPersecutionAngelsWillJudaismTheologianDeath PenaltyFactHeresyIdolatryUnbeliefHereticJehovahInquisitionDungeonsReligious LibertyBrute ForceThiefYahwehThe BiblePerditionSinaiSubjectMagiciansReligious PersecutionMinisterConvertsPentateuchBaalCanaanitesAuto Da FePenitentSinai Desert
Book:Some Mistakes of Moses
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“It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.”

JesusFreedomResponsibilityMarriageChristianityCorruptionSocialismDictatorshipHitlerFrench RevolutionNietzscheCelibacyInquisitionFreudMarxStalinLeninGalileoSubhuman
Book:Listen, Little Man!
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“Where there is no danger of overt action there is rarely any interference with freedom. That is why there has so often been amazing freedom of opinion within an aristocratic class which at the same time sanctioned the ruthless suppression of heterodox opinion among the common people. When the Inquisition was operating most effectively against the bourgeois who had lapsed into heresy, the princes of the Church and the nobles enjoyed the freedom of the Renaissance.”

PeopleActionChurchCommonOpinionClassDangerEnjoyedRuthlessHeresyRenaissanceBourgeoisInterferenceSuppressionInquisitionAristocratic
Book:Men of Destiny (Ppr)
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“It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.”

Has BeensHoursCuttingFailureWallDrivenTortureTragicDistractionChamberAvenuesInquisitionEvery Avenue
Book:The First Willa Cather MEGAPACK®: 50 Classic Short Works
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“Centuries from now our great-great-great-grandchildren will look back at us with amazement at how we could allow such a precious achievement of human culture as the telling of a story to be shattered into smithereens by commercials, the same amazement we feel today when we look at our ancestors for whom slavery, capital punishment, burning of witches, and the inquisition were acceptable everyday events.”

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Author:Werner Herzog
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