Crusade Quotes

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Only a mind free of impediment is capable of grasping the chaotic beauty of the world. This is our greatest asset.”
― Oliver Bowden, Assassin's Creed: The Secret Crusade

“What is the truth?’ he asked.
‘We place faith in ourselves,’ replied Altaïr (...) ‘We see the world as it really is, and hope that one day all mankind might see the same.’

‘What is the world, then?’
‘An illusion,’ replied Altaïr. ‘One we can either submit to – as most do – or transcend.’

‘And what is it to transcend?’
'To recognize that laws arise not from divinity, but reason. I understand now that our Creed does not command us to be free.’ And suddenly he really did understand. ‘It commands us to be wise”
― Oliver Bowden, Assassin's Creed: The Secret Crusade

“These bits of paper are covered with lies. They poison your minds. And so long as they exist, you cannot hope to see the world as it truly is.(...)You turn to them for answers and salvation. (...) You rely more upon them than upon yourselves. This makes you weak and stupid. You trust in words. Drops of ink. Do you ever stop to think of who put them there? Or why? No. You simply accept their words without question. And what if those words speak falsely, as they often do? This is dangerous.”
― Oliver Bowden, Assassin's Creed: The Secret Crusade

“The holiness of love inspired ordinary men and women to act like angels. It lifted them on wings closer to God.”
― Nancy Holder, Crusade

“Para siempre. Forever.”
― Nancy Holder, Crusade

“(Talking about the movement to deny the prevalence and effects of adult sexual exploitation of children)
So what does this movement consist of? Who are the movers and shakers? Well molesters are in it, of course. There are web pages telling them how to defend themselves against accusations, to retain confidence about their ‘loving and natural’ feelings for children, with advice on what lawyers to approach, how to complain, how to harass those helping their children. Then there’s the Men’s Movements, their web pages throbbing with excitement if they find ‘proof’ of conspiracy between feminists, divorcing wives and therapists to victimise men, fathers and husbands.
Then there are journalists. A few have been vitally important in the US and Britain in establishing the fightback, using their power and influence to distort the work of child protection professionals and campaign against children’s testimony. Then there are other journalists who dance in and out of the debates waggling their columns behind them, rarely observing basic journalistic manners, but who use this debate to service something else – a crack at the welfare state, standards, feminism, ‘touchy, feely, post-Diana victimhood’. Then there is the academic voice, landing in the middle of court cases or inquiries, offering ‘rational authority’. Then there is the government. During the entire period of discovery and denial, not one Cabinet minister made a statement about the prevalence of sexual abuse or the harm it caused.
Finally there are the ‘retractors’. For this movement to take off, it had to have ‘human interest’ victims – the accused – and then a happy ending – the ‘retractors’. We are aware that those ‘retractors’ whose parents trail them to newspapers, television studios and conferences are struggling. Lest we forget, they recanted under palpable pressure.”
― Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony

“A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered.”
― Eudora Welty

“This life, this entire world, was a crucible. It was the crusade of their times, and they were the knights, the warriors.”
― Nancy Holder, Debbie Viguie (Crusade)

“Then she reached to kiss him on the lips, and he let himself have that. Soft, warm, she loved him, a monstrous abomination, a Cursed One. This might be all they ever had, this moment, this kiss, this love.”
― Nancy Holder, Debbie Viguie (Crusade)

“In this book we paint an unprecedented portrait of Britain’s first ‘false memory’ retraction and show that, like other ‘false memory’ cases which appeared in the public domain, memory itself was always a false trail – these women never forgot. We are not challenging people’s right to tell their own story and then to change it. But we do assert that the chance should be interpreted in the context that created it.
Thousands of accounts of sexual and physical abuse in childhood cannot be explained by a pseudo-scientific ‘syndrome’. We have been shifted to the wrong debate, a debate about the malignancy of survivors and their allies, rather than those who have hurt them. That’s why the arguments have become so elusive. […]”
― Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony

“Throughout the history of the Deutschritter the German genius is very evident, romantic idealism implemented with utter ruthlessness.”
― Desmond Seward, The Monks of War: The Military Religious Orders

“Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange had argued for adults’ right to have sex with children – or rather by a slippery sleight of word, PIE inverted the imperative by arguing that children should have the right to have sex with adults. This group had been disbanded after the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, its leader, with some of its activists bunkered in Holland’s paedophile enclaves, only to re-appear over the parapets in the sex crime controversies of the 1990s. How recent it was, then, that paedophilia was fielded as one of the liberation movements, how many of those on the left and right of the political firmament, were – and still are – persuaded that sex with children is merely another case for individual freedom?
Few people in Britain at the turn of the century publicly defend adults’ rights to sex with children. But some do, and they are to be found nesting in the coalition crusading against evidence of sexual suffering. They have learned from the 1970s, masked their intentions and diverted attention on to ‘the system’. Others may not have come out for paedophilia but they are apparently content to enter into political alliances with those who have. We believe that this makes their critique of survivors and their allies unreliable. Others genuinely believe in false memories, but may not be aware of the credentials of some of their advisors.”
― Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony

“Reflective learning provokes critical thinking, enabling us to pose relevant questions, revealing the profound oceans of ignorance that surround even the most learned scholars in our fields of modern knowledge, invoking us to be active participants in the crusade for equality, representation, and social justice.”
― Martin Guevara Urbina, Latino Access to Higher Education: Ethnic Realitites and New Directions for the Twenty-first Century

“Religion is the most powerful entity on earth. A phenomenon that has conscripted millions to give or sacrifice their lives without so much as a minuscule query about their chosen beliefs or particular ideology. And today thousands of years on despite the huge advent, discovery and the advance of science forensic or otherwise, millions are still prepared and equipped to fall or kill in the name of their God, their Holy Scriptures, their messengers, their prophets and their faith’.”
― Cal Sarwar

“We often focus on the power of many whenever we think about how to bring change. But whether positive or negative, the power of one has far reaching effects than the power of many.”
― Benjamin Suulola

“When she spoke, her voice sang as if a thousand different religions had crawled into her throat to die. All faiths scrambled to rewrite their holy books, recomposing them to abet her every urge. All words she pronounced became gospel, every tremble of her flesh a great crusade against all non-believers.”
― Jonathan Douglas Duran, Cherries in the Snow

“Their [the crusaders of the First Crusade] growing conviction that they were operating in a supernatural context was heightened by the fact that, after a period of calm, the skies again became troubled, just as they began to move from Asia Minor into Syria. In early October 1097 a comet - one, incidentally, well-documented in Chinese and Korean records - was seen with a tail shaped like a sword. As the ground shook in the earthquake of 30 December the heavens glowed red and there appeared a great light in the form of a cross; this is possibly an early reference to 'earthquake lights'. On the night of 13 June 1098 a meteor fell from the West on to the Muslim camp outside Antioch. The night of 27 September seems to have been extraordinary, with an aurora so great that it was seen in Europe as well as in Antioch: it must have been visible over a large part of the northern hemisphere. On 5 June 1099 there was an eclipse of the moon as the crusade approached Jerusalem. These were interpreted as portents of a Christian victory; indeed it was said that had a solar, rather than a lunar, eclipse taken place on 5 June 1099 it would have forecast defeat.”
― Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading

“How often have we taken up arms in some crusade that appeared so impeccably brilliant, indisputably praiseworthy, and immeasurably grand that we came to believe that the crusade itself transcended all of the truth that would show it to be none of those things? And in the end, how many times were the arms that we took up in such a crusade discharged in our direction?”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The failure of Byzantium to uphold its territorial integrity from 1180 or defend itself 1203-1204 did not suggest it could necessarily have presented much of a bastion against the later Turkish invasion, however unpleasant the fourth crusade did not lead to the triumph of the Ottoman Turk”
― Christopher Tyerman

“The USSR felt safe only on a continent it controlled. The movement of Russian power or ideology westward from the Elbe or Danube could only bring the USSR into violent confrontation with the North Atlantic civilization. And the United States had twice taken to crusade to prevent the consolidation of Western Europe under single-power hegemony.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, This kind of peace