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About the scientific revolution: it “outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes”.

— Herbert Butterfield

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Christianity

More quotes by Herbert Butterfield

The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.”

The Origins Of History (1981)

Every age likes its historians to place events in a framework that corresponds with contemporary prejudices and answers to contemporary political desires.

Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (1955)

One of the paradoxes of history has been the way in which the name of England has come to be so closely associated with liberty on the one hand and tradition on the other hand.

Liberty in the Modern World (1952)

Since the 17th century England has had a happier fate than most of the countries of continental Europe. In particular she has been spared the most violent cataclysms and the bitterness of civil war.

The Englishman and His History (1944)

[T]he Aristotelian doctrine of inertia was a doctrine of rest—it was motion, not rest, that always required to be explained.

The Origins of Modern Science (1949)

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Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?

George Bernard Shaw Saint Joan (1923)

The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence, from Jerusalem, of a lunatic asylum.

Havelock Ellis

Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage.

Bertrand Russell Education and the Social Order (1932)

Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law [this quote is referring to English Common Law].

Thomas Jefferson Vol. 1 Whether Christianity is Part of the Common Law (1764)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Herbert Butterfield (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.