Thomas Cahill - History Quotes

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It is... ironic that, given its subsequent history of Jew-hatred, Christianity should become the vehicle by which Jewish values entered the mainstream.

Thomas Cahill
The Greek world will continue in almost constant cultural revolution from the time of Homer to the day Rome brings Greece to its knees in the second century B. C.... the longest trajectory of fluid development in any society known to history.

Thomas Cahill
How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?

Thomas Cahill
In another of history's terrible ironies, the barbarian influence on Western Christianity enlivened it beyond anything the diluted Greeks of Byzantium were now capable of. The mad barbarians pushed Western Christianity into retaining some of the plastic abundance, the inventive plasticity, the fathomless versatility that had once been incomparably characteristic of the Greeks.

Thomas Cahill
Pericles' words are echoed in other critical speeches of later Western history... Lincoln at Gettysburg... Churchill's... repeated promise to the British people... of "blood, toil, tears, and sweat." And no wonder, for both orator's knew their Thucydides and knew this speech [Funeral Oration over the Athenian dead in the first year of the Peloponnesian War].... the most obvious later parallel is the 1961 presidential address of John F. Kennedy.... When he told of the sacrifices yet to come, like Pericles he pulled no punches.... In neither case is there a confession of atheism, just an implied acknowledgement that a politician is no oracle and has no business speaking on behalf of heaven.

Thomas Cahill
The word the Athenians used for their Assembly was Ekklēsia, the same word used in the New Testament for Church (and it is the greatest philological irony in all of Western history that this word, which connoted equal participation in all deliberations by all members, came to designate a kind of self-perpetuating, self-protective Spartan gerousia—which would have seemed patent nonsense to Greek-speaking Christians of New Testament times, who believed themselves to be equal members of their Assembly.)

Thomas Cahill
Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed.

Thomas Cahill