distinguishing quality

It may be remarked that the harsh opinion of Machiavelli has been more widespread in England and the United States than in the nations of Continental Europe. This is no doubt natural, because the distinguishing quality of Anglo-Saxon politics has always been hypocrisy, and hypocrisy must always be at pains to shy away from the truth. The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, by James Burnham

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more on heresy

Pier did not feel that he was in danger, or under pressure either to divulge or to disguise his opinions, which he expressed with some vigour. The God who had given the law to Moses, he said, was a malevolent scoundrel, who would damn nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand men he had made; Pier, if he got hold of him, would spit in his face, bite and scratch him, break him in pieces, ‘May he die of gout!’ He expressed the anticlerical sentiments and anti-ecclesiastical views that had been current in the region – and not only in this region – for a century or more with the same vehemence: the church should have no property; its sacraments were invalid and its alms and penances worthless, since there was no purgatory; its buildings were not churches, but mere structures in which falsity and nonsense were spoken; its liturgy unintelligible, meant to deceive simple people; and the cross merely a piece of wood. Nobody should be condemned to death, and officials who pronounced such sentences, such as preachers of the crusade, were murderers. Marriage was prostitution, and nobody who slept with a woman, even his own wife, could be saved; Pier himself had not done so for two years, though his wife was not a believer but ‘an idiot like you’.

The War On Heresy, pg 207

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