Saints and Villains Quotes

“And what more can God do,' he asks, 'then to take on flesh and suffer every humiliation and every fear and every pain that humanity suffers? What more without destroying human freedom?”
― Denise Giardina, Saints and Villains

“How was God supposed to stop it? You're a free man, Alois. There are no invisible strings connecting you to God, directing your every move.'

But if God is all-powerful, God could intervene. God could find a way.'

And because God didn't intervene, it was all right.'

Yes.'

Too bad you don't believe in God, then. You've lost your excuse.'

Bauer blinked. He looked away. 'Perhaps I do believe in God,' he said.

Oh yes,' Dietrich said. 'God makes a convenient scapegoat. Or people always think God is absent when things are going bad for them. Things go better and God is back. Well, I want to live in the world as if there were no God. That is the only way God can truly be with any of us.”
― Denise Giardina, Saints and Villains

“It is a terrible thing to stand against one's own country in time of victory.”
― Denise Giardina, Saints and Villains

“Writes in his diary. In this country the conflict bubbles beneath the surface. Someday it will break out as it has at home. Woe to those who are alien here. It is not a place to seek to avoid one's destiny.”
― Denise Giardina, Saints and Villains

“And is that what you're suffering? Spiritual sickness?"

"It's what we are all suffering. We display different symptoms, that's all.”
― Denise Giardina, Saints and Villains

“Dr. Buchman is interviewed by a reporter from the New York World-Telegram. He announces there is no persecution of the church in Germany. He suggests that the Nazis, like Franco and Spain, are making the world safe for true Christianity and protecting the West from godless Communism. "Compare Germany today to England, which is seething with Bolshevism," he says. His rimless glasses glint in the pop of a flashbulb. "I thank God for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the Antichrist of Communism.”
― Denise Giardina, Saints and Villains

“But now I find now that I'm angry, always angry. It's not just the bullying and the threats. It's the way all logic and knowledge and reason are twisted into their exact opposites. So that it is no longer possible to converse with these people.”
― Denise Giardina, Saints and Villains

“Hitler and his followers were conspicuously present at Holy Day services across Germany, praying visibly and piously. In many churches, the crosses on Christmas altars were flanked by the national flag and the swastika, in thanksgiving for the gifts of baby Jesus and Fatherland.”
― Denise Giardina, Saints and Villains

“What is the theological position of a National Socialist student?"

"That the church exists to serve the Fatherland. That the Fatherland is a gift to us from God, and that God has blessed the Fatherland by raising up Adolf Hitler to lead us to our divinely ordained place at the head of the nations.”
― Denise Giardina, Saints and Villains

“Well, I don't know about Germany, but here they'll do anything if they's money in it.”
― Denise Giardina, Saints and Villains

“And these Scottsboro Boys," Dietrich added. “It seems Southern white people will enjoy hanging them. And yet the churches preach against alcohol and bad language.”
― Denise Giardina, Saints and Villains

“The Americans," he said. "They are so innocent, and so terrible.”
― Denise Giardina, Saints and Villains