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“Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;/ We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death”
― Algernon Charles Swinburne

“He'd already identified me as a heathen, and I hoped he wouldn't try to change that.”
― Marshall Thornton, Two Nick Nowak Novellas

“For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.”
― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

“If the Pentateuch is inspired, the civilization of of our day is a mistake and crime. There should be no political liberty. Heresy should be trodden out beneath the bigot's brutal feet. Husbands should divorce their wives at will, and make the mothers of their children houseless and weeping wanderers. Polygamy ought to be practiced; women should become slaves; we should buy the sons and daughters of the heathen and make them bondmen and bondwomen forever. We should sell our own flesh and blood, and have the right to kill our slaves. Men and women should be stoned to death for laboring on the seventh day. 'Mediums,' such as have familiar spirits, should be burned with fire. Every vestige of mental liberty should be destroyed, and reason's holy torch extinguished in the martyr's blood.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“We human beings regard ourselves as (or compare ourselves to) animals only when it suits us.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Oh, please.â€� Loki stepped back, examining me with a look of disappointment. “It’s only a matter of degree. So I killed a god. Big deal! He went to Niflheim and became an honored guest in my daughter’s palace. And my punishment? You want to know my punishment?â€�

“You were tied on a stone slab,� I said. “With poison from a snake dripping on your face. I know.�

“Do you?� Loki pulled back his cuffs, showing me the raw scars on his wrists. “The gods were not content to punish me with eternal torture. They took out their wrath upon my two favorite sons–Vali and Narvi. They turned Vali into a wolf and watched with amusement while he disemboweled his brother Narvi. Then they shot and gutted the wolf. The gods took my innocent sons� own entrails…� Loki’s voice cracked with grief. “Well, Magnus Chase, let’s just say I was not bound with ropes.�

Something in my chest curled up and died–possibly my hope that there was any kind of justice in the universe. “Gods.�

Loki nodded. “Yes, Magnus. The gods. Think about that when you meet Thor.�

“I’m meeting Thor?�

“I’m afraid so. The gods don’t even pretend to deal in good and evil, Magnus. It’s not the Aesir way. Might makes right. So tell meâ€� do you really want to charge into battle on their behalf?”
― Rick Riordan, The Sword of Summer

“The idea of fate permeated the religion of the Vikings at every turn. Everything in the universe, even the Gods, was subject to it.”
― Daniel McCoy, The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion

“The heathen could only be eliminated as a force if their culture was completely erased.”
― Tariq Ali, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree

“Good God, is the man a heathen?â€�

‘Worse, a capitalist with pretensions of culture.”
― Melanie Jackson, Impression of Bones

“Your head is filling up...”
― Matthew Sawyer

“It is bad enough to be unconverted and going to hell. It is even worse to say, “I know it and will not cry for mercy.”
― J.C. Ryle, A Call to Prayer

“The Hellene exists as an individual, a separate person within a community. The Germanic individual exists only as the representative, nay, as the personification of a whole. One might imagine that a supreme convulsion of the soul must tear the individual out from that whole, and let him feel him-self, speak as for himself. But actually, it is the opposite that takes place; the more the soul is moved, the more the individual personality is lost in the kin. At the very moment when man most passionately and unreservedly gives way to his own feelings, the clan takes possession of the individual fully and completely. Egil's lament is not the lament of a father for his son; it is the kin, that utters its lament through the person of the father. From this breadth of passion springs the overpowering pathos of the poem.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“Without honour, life is impossible, not only worthless, but impossible to maintain. A man cannot live with shame; which in the old sense means far more than now, â€� the "can not" is equal to "is not able to". As the life is in the blood, so actually the life is in honour; if the wound be left open, and honour suffered to be constantly oozing out, then follows a pining away, a discomfort rising to despair, that is nothing but the beginning of the death struggle itself.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“The key-note of ancient culture is not conflict, neither is it mastery, but conciliation and friendship. Man strives to make peace with the animals, the trees and the powers that be, or deeper still, he wants to draw them into himself and make them kin of his kin, till he is unable to draw a fast line between his own life and that of the surrounding nature. Culture is too complex â€� and we may add too unprofitable â€� a thing to be explained by man's toil for the exigencies and sweets of life, and the play of his intellect and imagination has never —until recent times perhaps â€� been dominated by the quest of food or clothing. The struggle for daily bread and for the maintenance of life until the morrow is generally a very keen one in early society, and it seems that the exertion calls for the exercise of all faculties and powers. But as a creature struggling for food, man is a poor economist; at any rate he is a bad hand at limiting his expenditure of energy to the needs of the day. There is more than exertion in his work; there is an overshooting force, evidence that the energy which drives him is something more complex than the mere instinct of existence. He is urged on by an irresistible impulse to take up the whole of nature in himself, to make it, by his active sympathy, something human, to make it heore.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2

“WHO IS A HEATHEN?
The one who may or may not worship his God, who may know who is God or who his God is, but does not really "Know" HIM, nor does what the Lord his God has commanded nor does he walk in HIS ways. There is a difference between knowing the right thing to do, doing the right thing, and doing things right.”
― Henrietta Newton Martin-Legal Professional & Author

“We are pilgrims who are going to the Holy Land.

His language seemed understandable, albeit strange, to the residents of Zara. The revelers' own speech was already garbled, too, so they regarded it with a fitting tolerance. Calmer already, they said to Arseny: Go on, then, cross yourself.

Arseny crossed himself.

The storm resumed in the same breath:

He cannot even cross himself properly! Could we have expected anything else from the Turkish infiltrators?

For a while, Ambrogio attempted to explain that Catholics and Orthodox cross themselves differently and demanded they be taken to the Venetian pretor, but nobody would listen to him any longer.”
― Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus

“The Heathen

What shall I do when the heathens stand
And accuse that I seldom lent a hand
To save them from pain and eternal woe
And stayed in my ease, but made others go

When the Message I knew, I knew full well
Could save them from sin and fear and Hell

Oh God, My God, on that dreadful day
When all excuses are tossed away
And there's no time left to repent and pray
As earthly treasures in ashes lay

Then Lord, oh Lord, what shall I say
For the money and time I have frittered away?”
― Leonard Ravenhill, Revival God's Way

“The Germanic prince must be glad-minded, cheerful, and gentle, whatever the actual circumstances. When Grendel harries Heorot, Hrothgar is all the same the glad-minded Hrothgar—the good king, who in all his sorrow had nothing to reproach himself. A man must be eadig (steadfast in his luck).”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volume One

“Familial history is not sensed merely as a series of events following one on the heels of another; nay, the living are filled by their ancestors. All history lay unfolded in its breadth, so that all that had once happened was happening again and again. Every kinsman felt himself as living all that one of his kin had once lived into the world, and he did not merely feel himself as possessing the deeds of old: he actually renewed them in his own doings. Any interference with what had been acquired and handed down, even if acquired from raiding or robbery, had to be met with vengeance, because a field of the picture of honour was crushed by the blow. But an openly expressed doubt as to whether that old grandfather really had done what he was said to have done is just as fatal to life, because it tears something out of his living kin; the taunt touches not only the dead man of old, but still more him who now lives through the former's achievements. The insult is a cut into the man himself; it tears a piece out of his brain, making a hole which is gradually filled with ideas of madness.”
― Vilhelm Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons: Volume One