Ideas grow quickly when watered with the blood of martyrs.
Those who die for their country are martyrs and those who live for their country are greater martyrs.
Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.
There is no single test or formula for producing moral progress anymore than there is for generating scientific truths. It is a process involving theoreticians, fact-gatherers, protestors, martyrs for the cause, authors of first- person narratives who change the way we see and evaluate the distribution of harms and benefits.
Education must have two foundations --morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.
When we read, we fancy we could be martyrs; when we come to act, we cannot bear a provoking word.
The world would use us just as it did the martyrs, if we loved God as they did.
We, who are the living, possess the past. Tomorrow is for our martyrs.
Through all history, from the beginning, a noble army of martyrs have fought fiercely and fallen bravely for that unseen mistress, their country. So, through all history, to the end, as long as men believe in God that army must still march and fall, recruited only from the flower of mankind, cheered only by their own hope of humanity, strong only in the confidence of their cause.
Martyrs and persecutors are the same type of man. As to which is the persecutor and which the martyr, this is only a question of transient power.
No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.
Nothing says romance like hobos, martyrs and decapitations.
Sensibility appears to me to be neither good nor evil in itself, but in its application. Under the influence of Christian principle, it makes saints and martyrs; ill-directed, or uncontrolled, it is a snare, and the source of every temptation; besides, as people cannot get it if it is not given them, to descant on it seems to me as idle as to recommend people to have black eyes or fair complexions.
History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.
I do believe that ideas ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs.
For some not to be martyrs is martyrdom indeed.
Martyrs, martyrs, martyrs,. . . we want a million martyrs to march on Jerusalem.
Venerate the martyrs, praise, love, proclaim, honor them. But worship the God of the martyrs.
The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number.
My blood is no different from that of other martyrs.