Controversial Sayings

Required prayers alone would be ineffective if those who offered them had their minds on worldly problems, instead of on God.

Guru Nanak taught that depriving others of their rights is a serious moral offense.

Injustice has no place in God's order because He is absolute just.

This is not laid down on human authority; it is God who speaks and prescribes a perpetual rule for his Church.

I am unwilling to pledge my word for his safety, for if he shall come [to Geneva], I shall never permit him to depart alive, provided my authority be of any avail.

I hope that the verdict will call for the death penalty.

Servetus suffered the penalty due his heresies, but was it by my will. Certainly his arrogance destroyed him not less than his impiety.

It would be indeed better to grant license to thieves and sorcerers and adulterers, than to suffer the blasphemies which the ungodly utter against God, to prevail without any punishment and without any restraint.

The Lord then would have all the godly to burn with so much zeal in the defense of lawful worship and true religion, that no connection, no relationship, nor any other consideration, connected with the flesh, should avail to prevent them from bringin…

We call predestination God's eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others.

The decree is dreadful, I confess. Yet no one can deny that God foreknew what end man was to have before he created him, and consequently foreknew because he so ordained by his decree.

...those whom God passes over [praeterit], he condemns [reprobat]; and this he does for no other reason than that he wills to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines [praedestinat] for his own children.

Free will is an empty term.

Free-will cannot will good and of necessity serves sin.

For the will is so overwhelmed by wickedness and so pervaded by vice and corruption that it cannot in any way escape to honorable exertion or devote itself to righteousness.

For we do not say that man is dragged unwillingly into sinning, but that because his will is corrupt he is held captive under the yoke of sin and therefore of necessity wills in an evil way.

Therefore, the bondage of the will to sin remains and yet such slavery is a voluntary and willful captivity.

All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death.

God himself has explicitly instructed us to kill heretics, to smite with the sword any city that abandons the worship of the true faith revealed by Him.

Many people have accused me of such ferocious cruelty that I would like to kill again the man I have destroyed. Not only am I indifferent to their comments, but I rejoice in the fact that they spit in my face.