Our little tribal circles, bound by social contracts and selfish mutual need. Everyone working in their own greedy self-interests and huddling together with their tribe, at war with all those outside who they regard as barely human. What breaks a hum...
It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.
The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.
In all times, and all countries especially in those countries which are divided within by religious faith, there are always fanatics who will be well contented to be regarded as martyrs.
Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings - stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of hu...
A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.
And there you sit, gloating over what you have done, as if you were a martyr or a public benefactor -- as complacent and smug and misunderstood as a princess from the moon forced to herd goats!
It does matter that it's the Olympics. I just did it my way. I'm not a martyr, and I'm not a do-gooder. I just want to go out and rock. And man, I rocked here.
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.
His head was boiled, impaled upon a pole and raised above London Bridge. So ended the life of Thomas More, one of the few Londoners upon whom sainthood has been conferred and the first English layman to be beatified as a martyr.
Sharkey: You boys got yourself a real martyr for a friend. Make it work for you. Patrick 'Patsy' Goldberg: Yeah, but what are we going to do with a martyr? Sharkey: Times change. Prohibition won't last much longer. Take it from me, a lot of you will ...
Religion, art, and science flourish best in a free society. True, freedom does not afford much opportunity for grand gestures. It has little room for martyrs. But life is not supposed to be about dying well. It is about living well.
The air was still. It was that hour before evening when the sun sheds great horizontal beams just above the horizon and the air itself reveals levels of dust and insect life previously unthought of.
He who suffers wins in politics. The martyr does not obtain the victory personally, but his group, his successors, win in the long run.
In our day heaven and earth are on tiptoe waiting for the emerging of a Spirit-led, Spirit-empowered people. All of creation watches expectantly for the springing up of a disciplined, freely gathered, martyr people who know in this life the power of ...
As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.
I always felt that if someone shot me, it would be great for the environmental movement, because they would make me a martyr. Our biggest fear was our children, because there was a tremendous amount of threat and intimidation, and my wife was terrifi...
The author of the Gospel of Judas wasn't against martyrdom, and he didn't ever insult the martyrs. He said it's one thing to die for God if you have to do that. But it's another thing to say that's what God wants, that this is a glorification of God.
Christ has come into the world to lay out a garden wherein, amid splendor and abundance, there should thrive the violet of humanity, the myrtle of mortification, the rose of love, the lily of virginal souls, the laurel of confessors and the palm of m...
The pillory and stocks, the gibbet, and even the whipping-post, have seen many a noble victim, many a martyr. But I cannot think any save the most ignoble criminals ever sat in a ducking-stool.