Martyr Quotes

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins. (Søren Kierkegaard)
The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower. View quote
Florence Nightingale
It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one. View quote
Horace Mann
I am a Bedouin warrior who brought glory to Libya and will die a martyr. View quote
Muammar Gaddafi
This child, who is grasping the stone, facing the tank, is it not the greatest message to the world when that hero becomes a martyr? We are proud of them. View quote
Yasser Arafat
I'm fighting so I can die a martyr and go to heaven to meet God. Our fight now is against the Americans. View quote
Osama bin Laden
It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much. View quote
Ayn Rand
A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something. View quote
Gertrude Stein
It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait. View quote
Erica Jong
The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them. View quote
Cormac McCarthy
I swear to God, I will see [the Palestinian state], whether as a martyr or alive. Please, God, give me the honor of becoming a martyr in the fight for Jerusalem. (Yasser Arafat)
We made mad love: Shadow love, Random love, And abandoned love. Accidentally like a martyr. The hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder. View quote
Warren Zevon
You don't have to be brave or a saint, a martyr, or even very smart to be an atheist. All you have to be able to say is "I don't know." View quote
Penn Jillette
It is the cause and not the death that makes the martyr. View quote
Napoleon Bonaparte
The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr. View quote
Thomas Szasz
I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and [illegible] liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded. View quote
Ingmar Bergman
The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel. View quote
Eduard Hanslick
Suffering is the ancient law of love; there is no quest without pain; there is no lover who is not also a martyr. View quote
Henry Suso
She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
Acquiring a repertoire in these days, when the vocal literature is so immense, so overwhelming, that the student with sense will devote all his energies to work and not imagine himself a martyr to art. View quote
Alma Gluck
One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were being counted. (Thomas Reed)
Let us all be brave enough to die the death of a martyr, but let no one lust for martyrdom. View quote
Mahatma Gandhi
Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live? The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest. But to live, - to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered, - this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour, - this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman. View quote
Harriet Beecher Stowe
It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle. View quote
Rollo May
You have eternity in which to explain and only one night to be a martyr in the amphitheater Get out, darling, and let me see the lions eat you. View quote
Margaret Mitchell