Anathema

Anathema was originally used as a term for exile from the church but evolved to mean "set apart, banished, denounced". The word comes from Koine Greek ἀνάθεμα, meaning "something dedicated, especially dedicated to evil", from ἀνατίθημι (anatithēmi), meaning "offer as a votive gift", from ἀνά (ana), meaning "on", and τίθημι (tithēmi), meaning "I put". It originally meant something lifted up as an offering to the gods; it later evolved to mean to be; formally set apart; banished, exiled, excommunicated; and enounced, sometimes accursed.

People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

Reza Aslan:...In the 5,000-year history of Jewish thought, the notion of a God-man is completely anathema to everything Judaism stands for....

...the Church can claim but one invention as thoroughly original with her — namely, the doctrine of eternal damnation, and one custom, that of the anathema. ~ Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.
The intellectual craves a social order in which uncommon people perform uncommon tasks every day. ~ Eric Hoffer.

Alphabetized by author or source:

: A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P -Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z ·  Anon · External links

A

• The victimisation or diminishment of human beings whose affections happen to be ordered towards people of the same sex is anathema to us.
  • Reverend Peter J. Akinola, in the Anglican Communion, in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anglican Communion, p. 639

• People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
  • Martin Amis, in Martin Amis: Only brain injury could make me write for children

• A select militia defined as only the privileged class entitled to keep and bear arms was considered an anathema to a free society, in the ...
  • The Second Amendment, in That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right. Revised, quoted by Stephen P. Halbrook, in p. 91

• Prophecy is judged false, bind him to the corpse of his wife, and hang him one cubit above the earth, for he is unclean, an anathema unto the Gods....
  • The Second Apocalypse, in Chapter Twenty-Three:Caraskand

• All Christian powers that are still neutral would be impelled to rise up against Turkey and cry anathema against her |inhuman Government and her ferocious 'Committee of Union and Progress,' and they would extend the responsibility to Turkey's Allies.
  • "Armenian Genocide", in The Armenian Herald, Volume 2, p. 223

• If you're asking if whether Jesus expected to be seen as God made flesh, as the living embodiment, the incarnation of God, then the answer to that is absolutely no. Such a thing did not exist in Judaism. In the 5,000-year history of Jewish thought, the notion of a God-man is completely anathema to everything Judaism stands for. The idea that Jesus could've conceived of himself — or that even his followers could've conceived of him — as divine, contradicts everything that has ever been said about Judaism as a religion.
  • Reza Aslan, in Christ In Context: 'Zealot' Explores The Life Of Jesus]

B

• ...the Church can claim but one invention as thoroughly original with her — namely, the doctrine of eternal damnation, and one custom, that of the anathema.
  • Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, in Isis Unveiled, Vol. II, p. 334

• ...rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event,...
  • Alain de Botton, in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, p. 112

C

• We not only do not believe that any are foreordained to evil by the power of God, but even state with utter abhorrence that if there are those who want to believe so evil a thing, they are anathema.
  • John Calvin, in Where Was God: Evil, Theodicy, and Modern Science, p. 107 quoted by Gary A. Stilwell from the Canons.

• Their whole creed was anathema to Karl Marx. He had no sense of patriotism or love of country. He urged what he called “the proletariat” in all countries to overthrow society by a violent revolution, to destroy the middle classes and all employers of labour, whom he denounced as ...
  • Richard Cobden, in Richard Cobden and John Morley, p. 37

D

• If any one says that Mary is the Mother of God, let him be anathema.
  • Dorotheus, bishop of Marcianapolis, The Dyophysite Christology of Cyril of Alexandria, p. 254

F

• Because an anathema upon unbelief has been appended as a guardian of the creed. very politic way, of maintaining the creed, this of anathema.
  • James Anthony Froude, in The Nemesis of Faith, p. 95

• The word [anathema] literally means something set up or laid by to be kept, as a votive offering might be hung on a temple wall after being devoted to a god. Because offerings devoted to the true God were commonly burnt in their entirety or otherwise destroyed, the word in biblical usage signifies something ‘accursed’ or doomed to destruction”.
  • Edward William Fudge, “Galatians and Corinthians: Exposition, Galatians 1:8-9,” from The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment, Third Edition. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2011 quoted in The Center for Theological Studies

G

Good Omens : Any prowling maniac would have had more than his work cut out if he had accosted Anathema Device. She was a witch, after all. And precisely because she was a witch, and therefore sensible, she put little faith in protective amulets and spells; she saved it all for a foot-long bread knife which she kept in her belt.

• Any prowling maniac would have had more than his work cut out if he had accosted Anathema Device. She was a witch, after all. And precisely because she was a witch, and therefore sensible, she put little faith in protective amulets and spells; she saved it all for a foot-long bread knife which she kept in her belt.
  • Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, in Good Omens : The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990), Wednesday

• When most people said "I'm psychic, you see," they meant "I have an overactive but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/ talk to my budgie"; when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have.
  • Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, in Good Omens : The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990), Saturday

• It may be tempting to focus on the fact that, even among those who support equality, men's involvement as fathers remains a far distance from what most women want and most children need. Yet it is also important to acknowledge how far and how fast many men have moved towards a pattern that not long ago virtually all men considered anathema.
  • Katherine Gerson, in parents sharing the parenting role quotes

• To our age anything Delphic is anathema. We want the definite. As certainly as ours is a time of the expert and technician, we are living under a dynasty of the intellect, and the aim of the intellect is not to wonder and love and grow wise about life, but to control it.
  • Harold C. Goddard, in The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1, p. 11

H

Charles Hodge: The w:Galatians (People) are severely censured for giving heed to false doctrines, and are called to pronounce even an apostle anathema, if he preached another gospel.

• To conservative Americans, he was anathema, an American turncoat. To Greeks, both those who followed him and those who hated him, he was the dominant political figure of the era.
  • Richard Holbrooke, in To end a war, p. 124

• Skills that are monopolizable are anathema to capital.
  • David Harvey (geographer), in Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry, p. 22

• The Galatians are severely censured for giving heed to false doctrines, and are called to pronounce even an apostle anathema, if he preached another gospel.
  • Charles Hodge, in A commentary on the confession of faith [of the Assembly of divines, p. 407

• A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.
  The intellectual craves a social order in which uncommon people perform uncommon tasks every day.
  • Eric Hoffer, in The Ordeal of Change (1963), Ch. 12: "Concerning Individual Freedom".

K

But change is anathema to authoritarianism, which will tolerate no deviation from rigid policies. Democracy acknowledges the right to … -Aung San Suu Kyi.

• Scientific enterprise, according to Kuhn revolution is exceptional and, indeed, extra-scientific, and criticism is, in ‘normal’ times, anathema...
  • Thomas Kuhn, in Philosophy of Science and the Occult, p. 131

• But change is anathema to authoritarianism, which will tolerate no deviation from rigid policies. Democracy acknowledges the right to ...
  • Aung San Suu Kyi, in Theories of Democracy: A Reader, p. 301

L

• ...scientific enterprise, according to Kuhn revolution is exceptional and, indeed, extra-scientific, and criticism is, in ‘normal’ times, anathema.
  • Imre Lakatos, in Philosophy of Science and the Occult, p. 131

M

Henry Miller:The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.

• Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the concept came, amusing to him even in his pain. … Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever.
  I am legend.
  • Richard Matheson, in I Am Legend (1954), Ch. 21

• ...those exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema.
  • Cormac McCarthy, in Reinventing the South: Versions of a Literary Region, p. 224

• ... teaching to me was anathema, chiefly because it would condemn me to a world of petticoats.
  • Agnes E. Meyer, in Out of These Roots, the Autobiography of an American Woman, p. 65

• The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.
  • Henry Miller, in Quotes by Miller Henry, p. 2

N

• He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the ...
  • Robert Neville, in Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror, quoted by Aviva Briefel in p. 178

P

• ...can claim but one invention as thoroughly original with her - namely, the doctrine of eternal damnation, and one custom, that of the anathema.
  • Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, in Isis Unveiled, Vol. II, p. 334

• This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England...
  • V. S. Pritchett, in Complete collected essays, p. 839

• She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.
  • Terry Pratchett, in Good Omens, p. 122

• Considerations of high and low, Hindu and Muslim, and untouchability were all anathema to him. When he was superintendent of the schools.
  • Premchand, in Indian Literature, Issues 219-221, p. 94

• Anathemas own form of witchcraft is similar: any prowling maniac would have had more than his work cut out if he had accosted Anathema Device. She was a witch, after all.
  • Tara Prescott, in Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose, p. 257

Q

Iqbal Z. Quadir: A military or government hierarchy is anathema to the dispersed population and diverse tribes of mountainous Afghanistan.

• A military or government hierarchy is anathema to the dispersed population and diverse tribes of mountainous Afghanistan.
  • Iqbal Z. Quadir, in Rockets to Markets

R

• A select militia defined as only the privileged class entitled to keep and bear arms was considered an anathema to a free society, in the same that Americans denounced select spokesman approved by the government as the only class entitled to freedom of the press.
  • United States Bill of Rights, in That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right. Revised, quoted by Stephen P. Halbrook in p. 91

• Our security depends on the [[{Allies|Allied Powers]] winning against aggressors. The Axis Powers intend to destroy democracy, it is anathema to them. Our security depends on the Allied Powers winning against aggressors. We cannot provide that aid if the public are against it; therefore, it is our responsibility to persuade the public that aid to the victims of aggression is aid to American security. I expect the members of my administration to take every opportunity to speak to this issue wherever they are invited to address public forums in the weeks ahead.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt, in Quotations

S

• We do not believe that that any are foreordained to evil by the power of God, but even state with utter abhorrence that if there are those who want to believe so evil a thing, they are anathema.
  • Gary A. Stilwell, on Canons in Where Was God: Evil, Theodicy, and Modern Science, p. 107

• Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is an … anathema to these idiots. I predict that in the near future, right wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus.
  • Gus Van Sant, in Hooked: Drug War Films in Britain, Canada, and the U.S., p. 198

W

• And that is why I am anathema to certain kinds of Australian intellectual. I've lost interest in the theatre because you can't get what you want ever.
  • Patrick White, in Patrick White: selected writings, p. 274