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“She would have to be a saint because that was the occupation that included everything you could know; and yet she knew she would never be a saint.... but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“...in a brutal country like ours where human life is cheap, it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs, high ideals--only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.'

'Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

“Beyond all the other reasons not to do it, free speech assaults always backfire: they transform bigots into martyrs.”
― Glenn Greenwald

“Without love everything can be nothing. Does that make me want to love? No. For me, Ignorance is still better than martyrdom.”
― Ira N. Barin

“When, in 2012, Newt Gingrich was asked about how his religious beliefs would affect his conduct should he become president, the Republican nominee hopeful answered, "One of the reasons I am running is there has been an increasingly aggressive war against religion and in particular against Christianity" in the United States. For a potential president to state that he sees himself as a wartime candidate who will defend his party against other citizens is astonishing. There is not even a pretense here of "united states".”
― Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“The myth of Christian martyrdom and persecution needs to be corrected, because it has left us with a dangerous legacy that poisons the well of public discourse. This affects not just Christians, but everyone. We cannot use the mere fact that we feel persecuted as evidence that our cause is just or as the grounds for rhetorical or actual war. We cannot use the supposed moral superiority of our ancient martyrs to demonstrate the intrinsic superiority of our modern religious beliefs or ideological positions. Once we recognize that feeling persecuted is not proof of anything, then we have to engage in serious intellectual and moral debate about the actual issues at hand.”
― Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom

“قل لهم : صمتكمْ عاركم
والشهادةُ ليست فضيحة
لنُخبئها مثل عوراتنا
قل لهم : إنها مجدُنا
وبها تتجمَّع في الرَّحمِ أسماؤنا لنكونْ
قل لهم :
يرجعُ الشهداءُ لأحلامهمْ .. وطفولتهمْ
كي يكونوا لنا وطناً .. لا سجونْ”
― إبراهيم نصر الله, أحوال الجنرال

“I suppose it's something to do with her black-brained religion not to take care of the body.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Those who endlessly praise the rank of martyrdom must first attain that rank! No invented rank is superior to the life! You stick to the life and let the fools stick to the death.”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The claim at the heart of this book has been carefully researched by several generations of scholars and is orthodox in academic circles, if not beyond. Christians under the Roman Empire were neither constantly persecuted nor martyred in huge numbers for their faith. They were prosecuted from time to time for alleged sedition, holding illegal meetings or refusing to sacrifice to the emperor. They were, like other convicts, sometimes tortured and executed in horrible ways. They seem to have been regarded by many Romans with distaste as a particularly silly superstition. But Christian stories of thousands of individual and mass martyrdoms over centuries have at best a limited basis in historical fact, and in many cases are sheer fiction.”
― Dr. Teresa Morgan

“The classic Aryan who idolized himself and who existed in his own dreams could not bear to see the Jew, the evidence of divine reality,and he would kill him.”
― André Frossard