Thomas Cahill

“The phrase "the violent bear it away" fascinated the 20th century Irish-American storyteller Flannery O'Connor, who used it as the title of…

— Thomas Cahill

“In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to…

— Thomas Cahill

Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as…

— Thomas Cahill

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

— Thomas Cahill

The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest - and to make it as…

— Thomas Cahill

“They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to…

— Thomas Cahill

“We followed the rump of a misguiding woman. It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be…

— Thomas Cahill

“Cujus regio, ejus religio (Whose region it is, his is the religion).”

— Thomas Cahill

We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish…

— Thomas Cahill

“I see a sweet country. I could rest my weapon there.”

— Thomas Cahill

(The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it, ... That's when I first started thinking…

— Thomas Cahill

“We will never make it under our own stem. Having made this connection, Augustine falls apart. What he describes at this point…

— Thomas Cahill

The Jews started it all-and by 'it' I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make…

— Thomas Cahill

The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters

— Thomas Cahill

Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent.

— Thomas Cahill

“Well, they may not be civilized, but they are certainly confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish…

— Thomas Cahill

If there are no books. There is no civilization.

— Thomas Cahill

One of my rigid goals is to keep each book under 300 pages because I think so much nonfiction is literally weighty…

— Thomas Cahill

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage - almost as if history…

— Thomas Cahill

“What will be lost, and what saved, of our civilization probably lies beyond our powers to decide. No human group has ever…

— Thomas Cahill

Throughout the world, half of all children go to bed hungry each night and one in seven of God's children is facing…

— Thomas Cahill

Throughout our world the cry of the poor so often goes unheard. The prophets harangued Israel and Judah unceasingly about the powerless…

— Thomas Cahill

“The worldview of a people, though normally left unspoken in the daily business of buying and selling and counting shekels, is to…

— Thomas Cahill

“After the Age of Pericles, as Athenian confidence dimmed, that famous confidence was all too often replaced by cynicism, modesty by cockiness,…

— Thomas Cahill