Word: torquemada
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...carpetbagging snollygoster with Torquemada tendencies should be denied a license to pilot the ship of state...
...critics and indicates how far we have travelled in the realms of hypocritical self-justification. We are close to the famous words of the bishop at the siege of Beziers, who was asked how to distinguish loyal citizens from Albigensian heretics: "Kill them all, God will know his own." Torquemada, weeping for the souls of unbelievers he had saved by burning their bodies at the stake, recalls our President's portrait of himself kneeling in prayer...
...This Torquemada to the liberals has proved that the responsible voice of conservatism can attract a considerably larger and younger following than the traditionally starchy upper crust which consisted of a handful of crumbs held together by their own dough...
...Fast. He was an unswervingly militant card-carrying Communist and something of a culture commissar for Communism. Himself a Jew, he became anti-Stalin and quit the Party only when he discovered that Stalin was anti-Jew. This underlies the special weakness of Fast's tale. In fashioning Torquemada as a demented racist and centering his story on the plight of the Jew, Fast ignores history. The Inquisition was concerned with heresy not heredity; it was Catholic Spain's method of safeguarding theological doctrine. Less than one-fourth of Torquemada's 8,800 victims at the stake...
...Inquisition was a page of terrible madness in history, but it was not the same as the racial and class madness that drowned Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia in the blood of victims who outnumbered Torquemada's by more than 1,000 to one. Another ex-Communist did rather better. Using the heavier stones of current history, Arthur Koestler built Darkness at Noon into something more than an adult horror comic; he made his book a classic defense against the ogres of absolutism who think that their political faith gives them power over the minds...