Thomas Cahill Quotes

12 quotes in 318 categories

• (The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it, ... That's when I first started thinking about the typical…
• The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest - and to make it as repeatable as necessary.…
• In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of…
• The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters
• We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of…
• The Jews started it all-and by 'it' I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us,…
• One of my rigid goals is to keep each book under 300 pages because I think so much nonfiction is literally weighty that people don't…
• We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage - almost as if history were nothing more…
• Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent.
• If there are no books. There is no civilization.
• Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph,…
• How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?

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