“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.”

“Interrogation...was the highest art of the inquisitor.”

“Once available, the inquisitorial toolbox could be put to use by any authoritarian regime with the will and the means to unpack and use it.”

“All the weaponry and tactics that have been deployed in the war on terror are justified by precisely the same theological stance once invoked by the war on heresy.”

“The persecutorial impulse - 'the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings as imagined agents of corruption and incarnations of evil' - seems to be hardwired into Western civilization.”

“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.”

“...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...”