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Thomas Cahill Quotes

1940–2022 United States

Thomas Cahill (1940 – October 18, 2022) was an American scholar and writer. He is best known for The Hinges of History series, a prospective seven-volume series in which the author recounts formative moments in Western civilization.

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Random Thomas Cahill quote

43 quotes

The terms of this new religion, though based on Hebrew models, were Greek terms.

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

Human beings never know more than a part, as "through a glass darkly"; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces.

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

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

How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)

If we are to be saved, it will not be by Romans but by saints.

How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)

For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life.

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

They [the Greeks] had become an essentially secular people.

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

More than a billion people in our world today survive on less than $370 a year, while Americans, who constitute five percent of the world's population, purchase fifty percent of its cocaine.

How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)

More than half of all our biblical commentaries between 650 and 850 were written by Irishmen.

How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)

Just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheistic.

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

The high abbesses... had the power to heal, ...almost certainly heard confessions, probably ordained clergy, and may even have celebrated Mass.

How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)

This swaggering behavior has confounded historians, prompting them to wonder if Columbanus was a little off his rocker. But I think we may chalk up this attitude to his Irishness.

How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)

Only when we step back can we see that we have been reassembling something that can stand in the wind.

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

Beowulf grappling with the monstors was a type of Christ grappling with Satan.

How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)

To be without music was, for the ancient Greeks, to be already dead... Ancient Greece was a culture of song.

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

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

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

Of the many people's of the earth, the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all. ...basically a businessman's religion of contractual obligations.

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

For the most part, in the union of Greco-Roman with Judeo-Christian, the Greco-Roman turn of mind combined with Judeo-Christian values. While the outward form of the Western world remained Greco-Roman, its content became gradually Judeo-Christian.

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

The Irish... developed a form of confession that was exclusively private and that had no equivalent on the continent.

How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)

The [Greek] myths were... attempting—at a deeper level—to feel the intangible and say the unsayable.

Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

Whether or not Freud was right when he muttered in exasperation that the Irish were the only people who could not be helped by psychoanalysis, there can be no doubt of one thing: the Irish will never change.

How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Cahill (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.