"Imbuing violence with holy meaning," wrote the historian Iris Chang, "the Japanese imperial army made violence a cultural imperative every bit as powerful as that which propelled Europeans during the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition."†
(source) Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken, 2010
It was the Spanish Inquisition, here-comes-the-Hindenburg bad kind of history.†
(source) Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl, 2001
I hope you're getting the Spanish Inquisition out of your system now.†
(source) Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, 2005
It was like a page torn from a book, a historical novel, perhaps, dealing with the captivity in Babylon or the Spanish Inquisition.†
(source) Elie Wiesel, Night, 1960
The word conjured up images of the Spanish Inquisition, of torture, the whip and the rack.†
(source) Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes, 2008
Cold Sassy is the kind of town where schoolteachers spend two months every fall drilling on Greek and Roman gods, the kings and queens of England, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Marco Polo, Magellan, Columbus, the first Thanksgiving, Oglethorpe settling Georgia, and how happy the slaves were before the War.†
(source) Olive Ann Burns, Cold Sassy Tree, 1984
Not when compared to the riots of the Urban Wars, the torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition, a test ride on the XR-85 moon jet.†
(source) J. D. Robb, Immortal in Death, 1996
Yeah, devoted-like the Spanish Inquisition.†
(source) W. William Winokur, The Perfect Game, 2008
What was this, the Spanish Inquisition?†
(source) Judy Blume, In the Unlikely Event, 2015
The Spanish Inquisition had precedents in earlier Inquisitions.
But to be beaten by the man who has always stood as the particular example of mediocrity in his eyes, to start by the side of this mediocrity and to watch it shoot up, while he struggles and gets nothing but a boot in his face, to see the mediocrity snatch from him, one after another, the chances he'd give his life for, to see the mediocrity worshipped, to miss the place he wants and to see the mediocrity enshrined upon it, to lose, to be sacrificed, to be ignored, to be beaten, beaten, beaten—not by a greater genius, not by a god, but by a Peter Keating—well, my little amateur, do you think the Spanish Inquisition ever thought of a torture to equal this?†
(source) Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, 1943