Quotes About Jesuits

“If history is written by the victors, conspiracy theory is typically written by the losers, and there were few greater losers in the revolution than the French church and especially the Jesuits.”

— Mike Jay

“Some seem to think that Jesuits are behind everything, without any evidence whatsoever.
That is not thinking, that is scapegoating.”

— Sienna McQuillen

“It's always gratifying to share a hobby with a friend, and pining for erstwhile suitors falls into that category. In the months to come, Libby and I would analyze our respective exes with the gusto and intellectual rigor of Jesuits.”

— Patricia Marx

“Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as 'the Jesuit Science.”

— Thomas E. Woods Jr.

“Before I met the Jesuits, I'd never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.”

— Pat Conroy

“But ... that's absurd!" he cried, blushing. "Your poem praises Jesus, it doesn't revile him ... as you meant it to. And who will believe you about freedom? Is that, is that any way to understand it? It's a far cry from the Orthodox idea ... It's Rome, and not even the whole of Rome, that isn't true-they're the worst of Catholicism, the Inquisitors, the Jesuits ... ! But there could not even possibly be such a fantastic person as your Inquisitor. What sins do they take on themselves?”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“After learning the language and culture of the Chinese people, these Jesuits began to establish contacts with the young intellectuals of the country.”

— Hu Shih

“The Jesuits had learned that a Christian mission to China could never succeed if it were not in a position to show and convince the Chinese intelligentsia of the superiority of the European culture.”

— Hu Shih

“Think I am? Smothered in fancy furs? The food churned in my stomach. I gagged. I ran to her backyard and threw it all up. Out she came. Look at what he did. Thrun up his First Communion breakfast. Thrun up the body and blood of Jesus. I have God in me backyard. What am I goin' to do? I'll take him to the Jesuits for they know the sins of the Pope himself.”

— Frank McCourt

“It is now an article of absolute faith among Republicans that 'the government' is an entity separate from 'the American people,' which they say the same way that the old Jesuits talked about 'the mystical Body of Christ.' It is now an ironclad commandment of conservative orthodoxy that 'the government' is something parasitic and alien.”

— Charlie Pierce

“Philosophers see no harm in the Jesuits other than in their effect on humanity and the sciences. The vulgar and especially the prejudiced only hate them from an envy and jealousy born out of conspiracy and intrigue at an organisation which overshadows them.”

— Cesare Beccaria

“Well, I've been in several films including documentaries, but the big blockbuster, I was hired as advisor to the actors, I was trying to make Jesuits out of them.”

— Daniel Berrigan

“The Jesuits I know who have died and all their lives were great teachers, they're the least remembered people.”

— Daniel Berrigan

“I'm not sure that Jesuits ever produce faithful Catholics. Because they're too fierce. It is Sturm und Drang, and it is guilt - it is all that battlefield stuff.”

— Peter Hammill

“We're pupils of the religions-Catholic, Protestant, Jewish ... Well, the Christian religions. Those who directed French education down through the centuries were the Jesuits. They taught us how to make sentences translated from the Latin, well balanced, with a verb, a subject, a complement, a rhythm. In short-here a speech, there a preach, everywhere a sermon! They say of an author, "He knits a nice sentence!" Me, I say, "It's unreadable." They say, "What magnificent theatrical language!" I look, I listen. It's flat, it's nothing, it's nil. Me, I've slipped the spoken word into print. In one sole shot.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“The simpler explanation,' Emerson with a distinct uvular component in his Sigh, 'may be that none of you people has ever known a moment of Transcendence in his life, nor would recognize one did it walk up and bit yese in the Arse,- and in the long sorry Silence, grows the suspicion that Jesuits are but the latest instance of a true Christian passion evaporated away, leaving no more than the usual hollow desires for Authority and mindless O-bedience.”

— Thomas Pynchon

“Jesuits encourage an intellectual rigor in a way that I like.”

— Alexander Payne

“Jesuits like to invite people into imaginative prayer. That's a classic Jesuit way to pray - to say, what would it look like, sound like, feel like to be in certain parts of the Bible.”

— Anonymous.

“I entered the diocesan seminary. I liked the Dominicans, and I had Dominican friends. But then I chose the Society of Jesus, which I knew well because the seminary was entrusted to the Jesuits. Three things in particular struck me about the Society: the missionary spirit, community and discipline.”

— Pope Francis

“The Jesuits have a vow to obey the pope, but if the pope is a Jesuit, maybe he should have a vow to obey the superior general ... I feel like I'm still a Jesuit in terms of my spirituality, what I have in my heart.”

— Pope Francis

“Colombia's advance to first rank among the criminal states in "our little region" is in part the result of the decline in US-managed state terror in Central America, which achieved its primary aims as in Turkey 10 years later, leaving in its wake a "culture of terror" that "domesticat[es] the expectations of the majority" and undermines aspirations towards "alternatives different to those of the powerful," in the words of Salvadoran Jesuits, who learned the lessons from bitter experience; those who survived the US assault, that is.”

— Noam Chomsky

“By what route the infant Hansen found his way to the Jesuits, the file did not relate. Perhaps the mother converted. Those were dark years still, and if expediency required it, she may have swallowed her Protestant convictions to buy the boy a decent education. Give the Jesuits his soul, she may have reasoned, and they will give him a brain. Or perhaps she sensed in her son from early on the mercurial nature that later ruled his life, and she determined to subordinate him to a stronger religious discipline than was offered by the easy-going Protestants. If so, she was wise.”

— John Le Carré

“My parents spent an awful lot of money sending me to the best possible schools, and I came out of my exams and thought, 'I don't really want to do a degree.' I did philosophy with the Jesuits for about a year, and then I joined a bank. While I was there, I saw an ad in an Irish paper for radio announcers.”

— Terry Wogan

“I'm a highly flawed individual, as we all are, and because I was raised by Jesuits, I'm constantly, 'What is it about me and what I can do to be better?'”

— Michael Moore

“Dan Brown is a character from 'Foucault's Pendulum!' I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.”

— Umberto Eco

“They were Jesuits," she told me. "That means they believe in God but not in terlet paper. You should have seen their underwear. Disgusting.”

— David Sedaris

“A cure by regression is homeopathic, like healing the damage done by ministers and ignorance with stupidity and Jesuits.”

— Franz Grillparzer

“The Armenians will willingly harbor
revolutionaries, arrange for their entertainment and the furthering of their ends. The pride of race brings about many singularities and prompts the Armenians to prey on missionaries, Jesuits, consuls and European traveler with rapacity and ingratitude. The poor Armenians will demand assistance in a loud tone, yet will seldom give thanks for a donation. Abuse of Consular officers and missionaries is only a part of the stock-in-trade of the extra-Armenian press.”

— Mark Sykes

“In the agreement to rescue Rome [i.e., the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy] from the predicament of losing its world control to Protestantism, and to preserve the spiritual and temporal supremacy which the popes [had] 'usurped' during the Middle Ages, Rome now 'sold' the [Roman Catholic] Church to the Society of Jesus [i.e., the Jesuits]; in essence the popes surrendered themselves into their hands.”

— John Daniel

“The Thirty Years' War, 1618-1648, was a series of conflicts that became the last great struggle of religious wars in Europe. It was fought almost exclusively on German soil ... but before the war ended, it involved most of the nations of Europe. The underlying cause of the war was the deep-seated hostility between the German Protestants and German Catholics - with the Jesuits and Cardinal Richelieu, who was the real ruler of France, fanning the fires to accomplish their ends.”

— John Daniel

“I'm very interested in the history of Christianity, and what I can say for sure is that the Catholics and the Jesuits and stuff were very big on teaching and on learning.”

— Ben Mendelsohn

“The Illuminati Order was preceded in the 1500's in Spain by the 'Alumbrados', a Christian heresy started by crypto-Jews called 'Marranos'. The founder of the Jesuit Order, Ignatius of Loyola, was a Marrano / Alumbrado. Thus when people today argue whether it is the Jesuits or Zionists or Illuminati who are responsible for our troubles, they are really talking about the same beast.”

— Henry Makow

“Marists are workers, we do all the work and Jesuits just think about it.”

— Warren Mundine

“The war, the American Civil War of 1861-1865, would never have been possible without the sinister influence of the Jesuits.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“The self must be a tense bow. It must struggle with opposites rather than harmonize them, rather than turn the tension over to the great instruments of last manhood the skilled bow unbenders and Jesuits of our days, the psychiatrists, who, in the same spirit and as part of the same conspiracy of modernity as the peace virtuosos, reduce conflict.”

— Allan Bloom

“The Jesuits are a MILITARY organization, not a religious order. Their chief is a general of an army, not the mere father abbot of a monastery. And the aim of this organization is power - power in its most despotic exercise - absolute power, universal power, power to control the world by the volition of a single man. Jesuitism is the most absolute of despotisms - and at the same time the greatest and most enormous of abuses.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“It was not reason that besieged Troy; it was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world; that inspired the crusades; that instituted the monastic orders; it was not reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not reason that created the French Revolution. Man is only great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination.”

— Benjamin Disraeli

“You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the
Jews do NOT greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews.”

— Benjamin Disraeli

“I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits ... Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gipsies can assume, dressed as printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters? If ever there was a body of men who merited damnation on earth and in Hell, it is this society of Loyola's. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum.”

— John Adams

“I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits ... If ever any congregation of men could merit eternal perdition on earth, and in hell, according to these historians, though, like Pascal, true Catholics, it is this company of Loyolas.”

— John Adams

“My history of the Jesuits is not elegantly written, but is supported by unquestionable authorities, is very particular and very horrible. Their restoration is indeed "a step toward darkness," cruelty, perfidy, despotism, death and I wish we were out of danger of bigotry and Jesuitism.”

— John Adams

“My History of the Jesuits is in four volumes ... This society has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.”

— John Adams

“I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the methodical path of the Jesuits ... It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation. DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that all can reach salvation.”

— Umberto Eco

“The Jesuits were good educators, exceptional teachers. In an era and in a society where freedom of speech was not held in high regard, of course, that the discourse be focused on what they were teaching, but we were able to go beyond this framework without incurring too great a risk.”

— Pierre Trudeau

“It was served of the Jesuits, that they constantly inculcated a thorough contempt of worldly things in their doctrines, but eagerly grasped at them in their lives. They were wise in their generation; for they cried down worldly things because they wanted to obtain them, and cried up spiritual things, because they wanted to dispose of them.”

— Charles Caleb Colton

“The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of tortures to their tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“To me, it doesn't matter if your scapegoats are the Jews, the homosexuals, the male sex, the Masons, the Jesuits, the Welfare Parasites, the Power Elite, the female sex, the vegetarians, or the Communist Party. To the extent that you need a scapegoat, you simply have not got your brain programmed to work as an efficient problem-solving machine.”

— Robert Anton Wilson