Witch Hunts Quotes

Or we could change the definition in another way. We could remove the part of the definition that refers to "supernatural powers." Then sorcery and witchcraft would include beliefs that unknown persons harm others using techniques that cannot be demonstrated to be real or that are not observable. In the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy played on people's fears in the 1950s by claiming that the government and Hollywood were filled with Communists dedicated to overturning all that Americans hold dear. In the 1980s and 1990s, various supremacists blamed certain political factions and minorities for social problems and what they believed to be the degeneration of their nation's values. Will there be other witch hunts in the twenty-first century? ~ James Peoples

It should be noted, as with so many legends and popularly accepted truths created out of political motivation: There, in fact, is no evidence that the hundreds of murders historically attributed to the werewolves of Gévaudan were actually caused by wolves. As with all witchhunts, the endless battle against ignorance requires one to always keep an open mind and sharp wits when considering such rumors - especially the rumors we choose to enjoy. ~ Zeena Schreck

Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers', no Northern Ireland 'troubles', no 'honour killings', no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money ('God wants you to give till it hurts'). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it. ~ Richard Dawkins

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services. ~ John Le Carre

To be the child of a conficted or reputed witch was inherently dangerous; in one pathetic case in Lorraine a young couple were both accused, and it emerged that they had decided to marry after attending an execution at the stake of their respective parents, 'so that they would have nothing to reproach one another with. ~ Robin Briggs

Sometime the witch hunting takes on atrocious dimensions - the Nazi persecution of Jews, the Salem witch trials, the Ku Klux Klan scapegoating of blacks. Notice, however, that in all such cases the persecutor hates the persecuted for precisely those traits that the persecutor displays with a glaringly uncivilized fury. At other times, the witch hunt appears in less terrifying proportions - the cold war fear of a "Commie under every bed," for instance. And often, it appears in comic form - the interminable gossip about everybody else that tells you much more about the gossiper than about the object of gossip. But all of these are instances of individuals desperate to prove that their own shadows belong to other people.

Many men and women will launch into tirades about how disgusting homosexuals are. Despite how decent and rational they otherwise try to behave, they find themselves seized with a loathing of any homosexual, and in an emotional outrage will advocate such things as suspending gay civil rights (or worse). But why does such an individual hate homosexuals so passionately? Oddly, he doesn't hate the homosexual because he is homosexual; he hates him because he sees in the homosexual what he secretly fears he himself might become. He is most uncomfortable with his own natural, unavoidable, but minor homosexual tendencies, and so projects them. He thus comes to hate the homosexual inclinations in other people - but only because he first hates them in himself ~ Ken Wilber

[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

Witch-hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil. ~ Arthur Miller

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

It's getting hard to keep up with all of the news from Washington - witch hunts, conspiracy theories and Republicans tearing each other apart over who is ideologically pure and who is apostate. It's a real set of carnival sideshows. ~ Andrew Rosenthal

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." Thomas was shortly afterwards thrown in jail for fraud. ~ Carl Sagan

Witch hunts are nothing new for America. The only difference this time round is that the old ones were for all the false reasons. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

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!" These social media shamings bear an uncanny resemblance to medieval witch hunts. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Puritans don't laugh - except at the sight of a burning witch. ~ John Derbyshire

Quincy laughed. "If I were Elizabeth I shouldn't thank either of you for that comforting diagnosis. Would it do any good to open Aunt Sarai's grave and drive a stake through her? If you believe in as much sorcery as that, you must regret the days of witch-burners, Carew."

Carew said quietly, "No. Witch-burners were barbarous blunderers. If I wanted to suppress a dangerous letter, could I do it by burning the envelope and leaving the letter loose? The witch would come back unchanged; I should merely have postponed the danger until another time and place. And have further handicapped myself to meet it, by depriving the witch, by violent death, of the years allotted her, or him, for evolution."

Joseph said with dry humor, "She might not have used them for that, Carew. At least not for your idea of it."

Carew shrugged. "That would be her responsibility, not mine. And, in any case, she would be that many years nearer the time of her inevitable change."

This time Joseph did not answer, only smiled. ~ Evangeline Walton

The arrogance of some of those who are so damned sure they are right is just astounding. Scientific witch hunts are often the worst kind, and have been since the secular authorities stopped enforcing the local bishop's decrees of anathema. ~ Jerry Pournelle

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 - and don't ever let anyone use the word witch-hunts about this; there were no witches - 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

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

We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today. ~ Thomas Szasz

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 Archimedes' 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.…" And on he went, invoking the illustrious names of Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampère, Boltzmann, and Maxwell. ~ Carl Sagan

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

[Dan] Brown states that five million women were killed by the Church as witches. In fact, modern research has shown that the witch hunts began in the sixteenth century in Europe and that between 30,000 and 50,000 men and women were burned to death for the crime of witchcraft. However, 90 per cent of those trials took place before secular tribunals in countries such as Germany and France where by the 1500s the Church had lost most of its influence in judicial matters. Indeed, it was precisely in countries like Spain and Italy where the Catholic Church still had influence that there were almost no witchcraft trials. ~ Michael Coren

Witches have their share of nasty legends to contend with, I said, thinking of the witch-hunts and the executions that followed. ~ Deborah Harkness

It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present day. ~ Johann Hari

It's funny how everyone hates witch hunts ... until they see a witch. ~ Jon Stewart

I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing.

Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Weste ~ Jung Chang

Sexism is hence to bad science as misogyny is to moralism. Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts. ~ Kate Manne

Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no
black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and
shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century - who do you
think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? - you can
imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as
'black-on-black' violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever
been referred to as 'white-on-white' crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war,
the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of
murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white. Despite
hundreds of millions of 'white' people killing each other throughout European
history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite
the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost
entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence.

Yet apparently working-class black Londoners had imported from America a
rap-induced mystery nigger gene (similar to the slave sprint one?) that caused
black people to kill not for all of the complex reasons that other humans kill, but
simply because they are 'black', and sometimes because they listened to too
much rap, grime or dancehall. This is, after all, what the phrase 'black-on-black
Akala

I think we can all agree that this fully checks out and that indeed it is men who are the true victims of witch hunts. Which they invented. To kill women. ~ Lindy West

The spirits made her sick, and I don't just mean the Scotch. ~ Lenora Henson

The man flinched. Quiet! my wife!'

'Is she sleeping?'

Iskaral Pust's face small face was so like a Bhok'aral's that the assassin was wondering at the man's bloodline - no, Kalam, don't be ridiculous - 'Sleeping?' the priest sputtered. 'She never sleeps! No, you fool, she hunts!'

'Hunts? What does she hunt?'

'Not what. Who. She hunts for me, of course.' His eyes glittered as he stared at Kalam. ' But has she found me? No! We've not seen each other for months! Hee he!' He jutted his head closer. 'It's a perfect marriage. I've never been happier. You should try it. ~ Steven Erikson

Believe it or not, I didn't plan to hit a witch with my car today." He shifted the gear stick into first and accelerated down the street. "It was on the agenda for tomorrow. ~ Juliette Cross

What we should be very concerned about is the excesses and the abuses. Where we see hunts where the fox is torn away out of the hole and thrown to the hounds, we have to be very concerned. Where we have hunts where foxes are bred for the sport of it, that is not pest control. That is pure bloody sport. ~ Huw Irranca-Davies

If I heard it once, I've heard it a thousand times from Ray Hunt. He said 'make the wrong thing difficult and the right thing easy'. Then he said 'but don't make the wrong thing impossible'. Well ... you learn from making mistakes. It's that simple. ~ Buck Brannaman

Witch-sign, they said. Little eddies, like miniature storms breaking the surface of the ocean. Witch-signs rise up in great numbers, last a few minutes, and then disappear. When the whirlpools are gone, all that's left is floating petals. Black sea roses.

Anomalies.

I'm not afraid. A queer chill settles into my bones, and I huddle, pulling my knees closer to my chest. What if Ilven's death really did raise something up out of the waters? But those stories Nala is talking about - they're just … fancies. There's no real truth to them, they're Hob tales. That's what our House crake taught me. Of course, Ilven always did find the old stories fascinating and told me how she secretly wished that they were still real, that there was more to magic than just the scriv-forced power of the Houses.

Oh Ilven. Bound now below the sea, caught in the kelp forests, nibbled at, her hair full of crabs and little ghost shrimp, a ghost herself. I choke on a sadness so sharp that it has sliced me in two. ~ Cat Hellisen

Don't yield to that alluring witch, laziness, or else be prepared to surrender all that you have won in your better moments. ~ Horace

ISCARIOT"

"A box of doves
I placed beside your chest
Liar
A stork of silk
With rubies in it's nest
Fire
Of my love
Will burn thee to a wizened word
For ere to go unheard.

A mare of wood
Elder, elm and oak
Liar
Will keep you fair
If you jest me no joke
Fire
Of my love
Will burn thee to a wizened word
For ere to go unheard.

I'm old and bruised
But my fate is that of youth
Liar
Trickster you
Be a grisly dragon's tooth
Fire
Of my love
Will burn thee to a wizened word
For ere to go unheard.

You gashed the heart of my heart
Like a Portuguese
Witch,
I'd planned for you this land
But you devoured my hand. ~ Marc Bolan

So I just waltz up to your witch-god and ask to go home,' Jorden said with little regard as to whether the statement was offensive or not.
The kaedith nodded again. 'That's about the size of it,' she said, and lit up another cigar. ~ Amos T. Fairchild

Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark. ~ William Cowper

Propagandists reveal themselves through their use of tricks such as "name-calling", employing "glittering generalities", "plain folks" identifications, "card stacking", "bandwagon" devices, and so on. Such devices could be identified easily in many religious and political speeches, even in academic lectures, and this approach to propaganda analysis led to a kind of witch-hunt for propagandists. ~ Klaus H. Krippendorff

Witches are good at dealing with it, and to suddenly find a blank where these tendrils of the future should be has much the same effect on a witch as emerging from a cloud bank and seeing a team of sherpas looking down on him does on an airline pilot. ~ Terry Pratchett

I could not sleep when I got on such a hunt for an idea until I had caught it; ... This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me; for I am never easy now, when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north, and bounded it south, and bounded it east, and bounded it west. ~ Abraham Lincoln

No one noticed Witch Baby as she went back inside the cottage, into the room she and Cherokee shared.
Cherokee's side of the room was filled with feathers, crystals, butterfly wings, rocks, shells and dried flowers. there was a small tepee that Coyote had helped Cherokee make. The walls on Witch Baby's side of the room were covered with newspaper clippings - nuclear accidents, violence, poverty and disease. Every night, before she went to bed, Witch Baby cut out three articles or pictures with a pair of toenail scissors and taped them to the wall. they make Cherokee cry.
"Why do you want to have those up there?" Weetzie asked. "You'll both have nightmares. ~ Francesca Lia Block

Organized religion is the school of hate, and never more exultant in its righteous indignation than when it talks about gay and lesbian. In America the unholy alliance between the know-nothing fundamentalists and the Catholic hierarchy keeps the faithful whipped up to a frenzy of witch-hunting and fag-bashing. ~ Paul Monette

It means that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still that she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and darkness before Time began, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and death itself would work backwards. ~ C.S. Lewis

When change cometh, she will bring peace at her back. She will not bend to your will; you must bend to heres. ~ Adriana Mather

When I began 'Wicked', I really thought of it entirely as a one-off, as the English say. There was no intention that there should ever be a follow up, because the subtitle was 'The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West'. She was dead and gone, as the book says, at the end. ~ Gregory Maguire

He who runs with the platypus is no more a man than he who swallows chesnuts ~ Chief Long Spear Who Hunts Beavers

Fiercely original and uncommonly lovely, The Witch's Boy is equal parts enchanting and haunting. Kelly Barnhill is master of truly potent and unruly magic; luckily for readers, she chooses to use her powers for good. ~ Anne Ursu

His eyes were like a forest at night - dark, wild, and dangerous. They were as fey as the rest of him, calling to mind thoughts of terrifying legends and powerful magic. You could fall into eyes like that, she thought, and find yourself trapped forever.

In that moment, he resembled exactly what he was: a witch prince, out for blood. ~ Nenia Campbell

Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead. ~ E.Y. Harburg

She comes by night, in fearsome flight, in garments black as pitch, the queen of doom upon her broom, the wild and wicked witch. ~ Jack Prelutsky

Once upon a time," I began. "There was a little boy born in a little town. He was perfect, or so his mother thought. But one thing was different about him. He had a gold screw in his belly button. Just the head of it peeping out.
"Now his mother was simply glad he had all his fingers and toes to count with. But as the boy grew up he realized not everyone had screws in their belly buttons, let alone gold ones. He asked his mother what it was for, but she didn't know. Next he asked his father, but his father didn't know. He asked his grandparents, but they didn't know either.
"That settled it for a while, but it kept nagging him. Finally, when he was old enough, he packed a bag and set out, hoping he could find someone who knew the truth of it.
"He went from place to place, asking everyone who claimed to know something about anything. He asked midwives and physickers, but they couldn't make heads or tails of it. The boy asked arcanists, tinkers, and old hermits living in the woods, but no one had ever seen anything like it.
"He went to ask the Cealdim merchants, thinking if anyone would know about gold, it would be them. But the Cealdim merchants didn't know. He went to the arcanists at the University, thinking if anyone would know about screws and their workings, they would. But the arcanists didn't know. The boy followed the road over the Stormwal to ask the witch women of the Tahl, but none of them could give him an answer.
"Eventually he went to the ~ Patrick Rothfuss

If I walked in there right now, you would beg me to make you scream."
"Oh, please," she said sarcastically.
"We wouldn't make it to a bed before I would be deep inside you. ~ Zoe Forward

In the 1400s it became the figure of the Witch that subsequently blossomed into an international satanic conspiracy. Why did this happen? How did the Sabbat obtain such prominence? Why did the witch become so reviled? Without understanding the enemy there is no answer that can be given. The creation of a purely malefic figure of the Witch was an attack on women, though men too were burned. Woman was attacked in this way to enable the state to enclose the common land. Woman was attacked to remove her control over her womb. Woman was attacked to divide the sexes and rend the social fabric. Woman was attacked to destroy the sense of the sacred in nature. Woman was memory of ancestor and clan. ~ Peter Grey

Bryce stared at the fire, her face still splattered with the Archangel's blood. And finally, she lifted her eyes. Right to the camera. To the world watching.

Vengeance incarnate. Wrath's bruised heart. She would bow for no one. Hunt's lightning sang at the sight of that brutal, beautiful face. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Oh, for Thor's sake ... " said Hiccup. "I thought that was just a story ... "
"Stories come from somewhere," said the witch. "The past haunts the present in more ways than we realise. ~ Cressida Cowell

It wasn't every day a witch came to see him.
Darius deCompostela gave up on the paperwork he'd been trying to fill out and leaned back in his chair. Semantics. Technically, Georgia Clare hadn't come to see him. She'd come to see MacMillian. Most people did, often with barely a sideways glance in his direction. Usually, that chafed.
Not this time. For one thing, her reluctance to speak with him didn't seem to have anything to do with, well, him.
For another thing, he didn't do witches. ~ Laura Oliva

Faith, stay here this night; they will surely do us no harm; you saw they speak us fair, give us gold; methinks they are such a gentle nation that, but for the mountain of mad flesh that claims marriage of me, could find in my heart to stay here still and turn witch. ~ William Shakespeare

As I closed the door I caught a last glimpse of her through the round window, still sitting straight-backed and motionless with her hands folded in her lap: a queen in a fairy tale, left alone in her tower to mourn her lost, witch-stolen princess. ~ Tana French

And then I said to her, Rachel, you're out of your ever-lovin' mind. There's no way in h-e-double-toothpicks you'd find me hookin' up with a faery, especially one of the unseelie court, no matter how well hung he is. Ya just never know with them, do ya? I hear about a witch in Quebec who crossed one of the unseelie princes, and she ended up with three breasts. Can you imagine what she goes through trying to find a bra that fits? ~ Katie MacAlister

Though it was bright sunshine everyone felt suddenly cold. The only two people present who seemed to be quite at their ease were Aslan and the Witch herself. It was the oddest thing to see those two faces - the golden face and the dead-white face so close together. Not that the Witch looked Aslan exactly in his eyes; Mrs Beaver particularly noticed this. ~ C.S. Lewis

If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most, or else just silly. ~ C.S. Lewis

Nell was like a witch. Her long silvery hair rolled into a bun on the back of her head, the narrow wooden house on the hillside in Paddington, with its peeling lemon-yellow paint and overgrown garden, the neighborhood cats that followed her everywhere. The way she had of fixing her eyes so straight on you, as if she might be about to cast a spell. ~ Kate Morton

Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me? ~ C.S. Lewis

I had learning problems when I was in elementary school, and didn't really start to read well until high school. I never read any of the middle grade classics that were popular when I was young - 'Harriet the Spy', 'Charlotte's Web', 'The Witch of Blackbird Pond', 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'. ~ Lauren Tarshis

She was prisoner to an old, forgotten god, kept from her home, probably never to see it again, and yet ... the way she sat, poised, calm, clear like a full moon night, she seemed much happier than me, the witch who contained them all, the jailer with the magic key. ~ Sarah Diemer

Curiouser and curiouser, he says. I smile at the reference. Carroll was totally a witch. The secrets of our world are written into that book. ~ Danielle Ellison

The evening pulsed with omens gentle to the eyes, and Valentina had a romantic crush on it all, like every good witch should. ~ Lawren Leo

[There are dangers in] the disposition to hunt down rich men as if they were noxious beasts. ~ Winston Churchill