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“Everyone loves a witch hunt as long as it's someone else's witch being hunted.”
― Walter Kirn

“Sometimes painfully lost people can teach us lessons that we didn't think we needed to know, or be reminded of---the more history changes, the more it stays the same.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“When you are being judged by someone that has no idea who you are always remember this: Dogs always bark at strangers and usually there is always some wacko neighbor that wants to try out their new gun on an intruder.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Who knows why we were taught to Fear the Witches
And not those that burned them
Or those who stood by, watching.”
― Affinity Soul

“Never stand in the way of letting God use people’s actions, in order to solve a greater issue in the world.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“When I was girl by Nilus stream
I watched the deserts stars arise;
My lover, he who dreamed the Sphinx,
Learned all his dreaming from eyes.

I bore in Greece a burning name,
And I have been in Italy
Madonna to a painter-lad,
And mistress to a Medici.

And have you heard (and I have heard)
Of puzzled men with decorous mien,
Who judged - the wench knew far too much -
And burnt her on the Salem green?”
― Adelaide Crapsey, Verse

“When a small group of people come together to relive the Salem witch hunts, God cries. For if anything is sorrowful to God, it is evil done in his name. When you find out you were not given the truth, how will you live with yourself?”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Claiming to be offended is a great way to elevate yourself at the expense of others: “Look at me! I'm a much better person than you! And I judge you! I condemn you! Shame! Shame! SHAME!â€� These social media shamings bear an uncanny resemblance to medieval witch hunts.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Bad Choices Make Good Stories: The Heroin Scene in Fort Myers

“[W]omen were those most likely to be victimized because they were the most 'disempowered' by these changes, especially older women, who often rebelled against their impoverishment and social exclusion and who consituted the bulk of the accused. In other words, women were charged with witchcraft because the restructuring of rural Europe at the dawn of capitalism destroyed their means of livelihood and the basis of their social poer, leaving them with no resort but dependence on the charity of the better-off at a time when communal bonds were disintegrating and a new morality was taking hold that criminalized begging and looked down upon charity, the reputed path to eternal salvation in the medieval world.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“Who knows why we were taught to Fear the Witches
And not those that burned them
Or those who stood by watching.”
― Affinity Soul

“It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“The theologian Meric Casaubon argued—in his 1668 book, Of Credulity and Incredulity—that witches must exist because, after all, everyone believes in them. Anything that a large number of people believe must be true.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Brought before HCUA, Miller was chastised for the suggestion that Congressional investigations might have something in common with witch trials; he replied, “The comparison is inevitable, sir.â€� Thomas was shortly afterwards thrown in jail for fraud.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“For all this talk about us being a nation at war with child abuse, and for all the media hype about witch-hunts and false allegations â€� and don't ever let anyone use the word witch-hunts about this; there were no witches â€� the fact remains that in 1994, it is extremely difficult to come forward with allegations of sexual abuse. And the external forces of denial are almost overwhelming. If a case as verified as mine meets with denial, I dread to think about the experience of people who don't have the kind of corroboration that I do. And I really worry that we're getting close to a point where it's going to be impossible to prosecute child molesters, because we don't believe children, and now we don't believe adults. (Cheit "Paper presented at the Mississippi Statewide Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect" Jackson, April 29 1994.)”
― Ross Cheit

“They had set forth to rid their town of evil and had managed to rid it of pleasure as well.”
― Angel Cox, A Day in the Dark

“[H]as it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?"

[1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor' (Columbia University / The New York Times, December 12, 1991)]”
― Salman Rushdie

“These social media shamings bear an uncanny resemblance to medieval witch hunts.â€�

If you were accused of being a witch back then, you were shit out of luck. Being accused was all it took. Forget “innocent until proven guilty.� Nobody bothered to prove your guilt. Nobody dared to speak up on your behalf, for fear of being called a witch sympathizer. Because if you were seen as the friend of a witch, you were the next one to be accused of being a witch.

As soon as a woman was accused of being a witch, she was a pariah without any friends. Nobody wanted to be seen in public with her. The whole village ganged up on her. Everyone was trying to outdo everyone else in their antiwitch fervor: “Look at me! I'm throwing rocks at the witch! Look at how much I hate witches! I am definitely NOT a witch myself!�

Whenever I see a social media mob ganging up on a celebrity for supposedly saying something “offensive� it reminds me of the Salem witch hysteria: “That's racist! And me calling you a racist proves that I'm definitely not a racist myself! That's sexist! I shame you! And that means I'm definitely not sexist myself! I shame you for being a bad person. That means I'm a good person! Look at how really really offended I am! That means I'm a really really good person!�

According to the bible, Jesus said "let he who is without sin throw the first rock." But a lot of people seem to think he said: "If you throw rocks at someone else, it proves that you're without sin.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Why Creeps Don't Know They're Creeps - What Game of Thrones can teach us about relationships and Hollywood scandals

“The mob is the most deadly of all critics in that it thinks critically only towards critical thinkers.”
― Criss Jami

“I was far more afraid of those who hated sinners than I ever was of sin.”
― Crystal Smith, Bloodleaf

“Condon, quick on his feet, replied that the accusation was untrue. He was not a revolutionary in physics. He raised his right hand: “I believe in Archimedesâ€� Principle, formulated in the third century B.C. I believe in Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton’s laws.…â€� And on he went, invoking the illustrious names of Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampère, Boltzmann, and Maxwell.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“The spirits made her sick, and I don't just mean the Scotch.”
― Lenora Henson, The Wicked Garden

“..Abigail's singing while I painted. How we laughed so when no one was watching. And how finding a black-eyed Susan tucked into my business contracts reminded me of why I was doing that business in the first place. To really care for another is a reason to live.”
― Adriana Mather, How to Hang a Witch

“Puritans don’t laugh—except at the sight of a burning witch.”
― John Derbyshire

“When the hysteria of a witch-hunt is granted supremacy over the logic, values and spirit of the law, justice can only become a warped, alien concept in that society.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Birdsâ€� of
a
feather
burn
together,â€� though
as
a
rule
ravens
are
singular”
― Margaret Atwood, Morning In The Burned House: Poems

“Similarly unsubstantiated upon close examination is the claim that there is somehow a parallel between current concern over child sexual abuse and witch hunts of previous historical eras. The only similarity is the presence of children making accusations against protesting adults; and even here the parallel is limited, since most child sexual abuse victims do not eagerly disclose their plights. The witch-hunt analogy does not work for several reasons. In the past people became hysterial about witches because ignorance and lack of education led them to believe in a nonexistent evil, whereas current concern about child sexual abuse results from increased education and sophisticated research, and a growing body of medical and psychological proofs that validate the existance of a very real evil. Witch hunts flourished because the authoritative force of society, the Church, encouraged them and supported accusers. In our society, however, validation of child sexual abuse victims has occurred despite the failure of our authoritative force, the legal system, to encourage the abusers. Witches were tortured, hanged, and burned. Child abusers are rarely reported to authorities, and those who are seldom see the inside of a jail or even a psychiatrist's office. National statistics on child sexual abuse indicate, for example, that judges only see 15.4 percent of sexual abuse cases.(39)”
― Billie Wright Dziech, On Trial: America's Courts and Their Treatment of Sexually Abused Children

“Ultimately, the witch craze was not the result of just one single factor. Rather, it was a conglomeration of influences that worked together over the span of hundreds of years to shape early modern Europe into the ideal environment for a continent-wide witch hunt: misogyny, patriarchy, religious tyranny, scapegoating, land disputes, the rise of capitalism, shifting views about magic, political propaganda, and an established history of persecution and violence.”
― Celeste Larsen, Heal the Witch Wound: Reclaim Your Magic and Step Into Your Power

“During the Burning Times, standing out and speaking up meant risking literal persecution: imprisonment, torture, sexual assault, and murder. The scars of this trauma run deep in our collective unconscious; they remind us that in the not-so-distant past, being marked as different ran the risk of physical harm and death. Even today, being too much or not enough for modern society can mean being ostracized, judged, and shamed. In this way, the witch wound is your psyche’s way of trying to keep you safe. Your consciousness holds this warning because your ancestorsâ€� bodies carried it over the span of generations, passing it down to you.”
― Celeste Larsen, Heal the Witch Wound: Reclaim Your Magic and Step Into Your Power

“If our witches' phantasies were not corrupted, nor their wits confounded with this humour, they would not so voluntarilie and readilie confesseth that which calleth their life into question.”
― Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft

“The downtrodden yearned for stories to explain their misfortunes, though what they really wanted was somebody to blame for their misery. It was impossible to set fire to the blight that had ruined your crops, but a blight was easily summoned by a witch, at which point any poor woman would do.”
― Stuart Turton