Thomas Cahill Quotes

• 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 psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.

  Thomas Cahill

  Swimming, Imagination, Depth

  FaceBook post by Thomas Cahill from Jan 12, 2012

  48 Copy quote

• We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage - almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.

  Thomas Cahill

  Pain, War, Blessed

  Thomas Cahill (2010). “Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginning of the Modern World”, p.3, Anchor

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• 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, Jew and Gentile, believer and aethiest, tick. Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings ... we would think with a different mind, interpret all our experience differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different course for our lives.

  Thomas Cahill

  Mean, Eye, Thinking

  "The Gifts of the Jews : How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels". Book by Thomas Cahill, 1998.

  18 Copy quote

• 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 our best words, in fact - new, adventure, surprise; unique, individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice - are the gifts of the Jews.

  Thomas Cahill

  Dream, Morning, Adventure

  "Jews Built the Civilization That the Irish Saved / Thomas Cahill says Israelites provided the foundation for Western culture" by Ron H. Feldman, www.sfgate.com. March 29, 1998.

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• 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, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies' heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe. And that is how the Irish saved civilization.

  Thomas Cahill

  Book, Hero, Europe

  FaceBook post by Thomas Cahill from Mar 07, 2015

  13 Copy quote

• If there are no books. There is no civilization.

  Thomas Cahill

  Book, Civilization, Ifs

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• Throughout the world, half of all children go to bed hungry each night and one in seven of God's children is facing starvation. Before such statistics, believers should never forget Dostoevsky's assertion that the suffering of children is the greatest proof against the existence of God; for without justice, there is no God.

  Thomas Cahill

  Children, Night, Justice

  Thomas Cahill (2010). “The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels”, p.252, Anchor

  6 Copy quote

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

  Thomas Cahill

  Real, History, Soup

  Thomas Cahill (2010). “How the Irish Saved Civilization”, p.5, Anchor

  7 Copy quote

• Throughout our world the cry of the poor so often goes unheard. The prophets harangued Israel and Judah unceasingly about the powerless and marginalized, the overlooked widows, orphans, and "sojourners in our midst," who are still with us today as single mothers, hungry children, and helpless immigrants, wraiths invisible in our prosperous societies.

  Thomas Cahill

  Mother, Children, Our World

  Thomas Cahill (2010). “The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels”, p.252, Anchor

  4 Copy quote

• The phrase the violent bear it away fascinated the 20th century Irish-American storyteller Flannery O'Connor, who used it as the title of one of her novels. O'Connor's surname connects her to an Irish royal family descended from Conchobor (pronounced Connor), the prehistoric king of Ulster who was foster father to Cuchulainn and husband of the unwilling Derdriu. In the western world, the antiquity of Irish lineages is exceeded only by that of the Jews.

  Thomas Cahill

  Kings, Husband, Father

  Thomas Cahill (2011). “How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe”, p.71, Hachette UK

  6 Copy quote

• 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 get through these books ... If people don't finish your book, then they don't know what you're talking about.

  Thomas Cahill

  Book, Thinking, Talking

  "Thomas Cahill's mission: to restore the West's genealogy" by Jamie Allen, www.cnn.com. November 27, 1998.

  7 Copy quote

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

  Thomas Cahill

  World, Shapes, Poet

  Thomas Cahill (2010). “How the Irish Saved Civilization”, p.129, Anchor

  8 Copy quote

• (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 view of reality.

  Thomas Cahill

  Reality, Thinking, Views

  "Thomas Cahill's mission: to restore the West's genealogy" by Jamie Allen, www.cnn.com. November 27, 1998.

  7 Copy quote

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

  Thomas Cahill

  Inconsistent, One Thing

  Thomas Cahill (2010). “Mysteries of the Middle Ages: And the Beginning of the Modern World”, p.97, Anchor

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• 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 fact, repetition was encouraged on the theory that, oh well, everyone pretty much sinned just about all the time.)

  Thomas Cahill

  Innovation, Facts, Affair

  Thomas Cahill (2010). “How the Irish Saved Civilization”, p.177, Anchor

  4 Copy quote

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