“...the workings of the Inquisition did not fundamentally change over its six-hundred-year history. The Inquisition was a machine with interchangeable parts, just as its inventors had intended...”

“Precisely because the Inquisition provides a blueprint for building and operating the machinery of persecution...the Inquisition was and still is a danger to human life and human liberty.”

“No offense against moral order was too trivial to escape the attention of the Spanish Inquisition.”

“Like the victims of the historical Inquisition and its other modern equivalents, the men and women who were targeted during the McCarthy era were not guilty of any wrongful acts; rather, they were accused only of thought-crimes.”

“Indeed, the greatest single innovation of the Spanish Inquisition was to turn heresy from a thought-crime into a blood-crime...”

“Above all, we cannot and should not try to distance ourselves from any of these inquisitions by reassuring ourselves that no abuse of 'moral justice' could occur in the American democracy.”

“What Hitler and Stalin had in common was the same aspiration that animated the first inquisitors - the simple but deadly notion that it was both possible and desirable to rid the world of anyone whom the regime deemed to be unworthy of life.”