“The young, talented, and already greatly respected historian Friedrich Meinecke wrote in the early months of the [First World] war that what the foreigner calls brutality in German behavior, the German himself must call simply honesty. After all, if the cathedral at Rheims was being used by French observers, it had to be bombed. It was as simple as that. For the French and British to call the German a barbarian in these circumstances was pure hypocrisy. Meinecke was relatively moderate. Another German historian expressed similar ideas in shriller tones: ‘Better than a thousand church towers fall than that one German soldier should fall as a result of these towers. Let’s not have any whining from humanists and aesthetes among ourselves. We have to assert ourselves. Those are such simple truths that it becomes tedious to have to repeat them to people who don't wish to hear.’ Rather than such unequivocal assertions about the pre-eminence of life force over history, one might have expected from Meinecke and his confrère, given their professions, a greater respect for the dependence of the individual and the nation on their historical context. Yet the emphasis in their comments is on the Dionysian act of self-assertion. In the course of the war, thirty-five of forty-three holders of chairs in history in German universities were to aver that Germany had become involved in the war only because she had been attacked.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“The climax of The Lord of the Rings [he refers to the siege of Minas Tirith] palpably echoed the momentous events of 955: the attack on Augsburg and the battle of the Lech. A wise and battle-seasoned scholar, consecrated in his mission by a supernatural power, standing in the gateway of a breached city and blocking the enemy’s advance. An army of mail-clad horsemen arriving to contend the battlefield just as the invaders seemed to have victory in their grasp. A king armed with a sacred weapon, laying claim to an empty imperial throne. In 2003, a film of The Lord of the Rings had brought Aragorn's victory over the snarling hordes of Mordor to millions who had never heard of the battle of the Lech. Burnished and repackaged for the twenty-first century, Otto’s defense of Christendom still possessed a spectral glamour. Its legacy, though, that summer of 2014, was shaded by multiple ironies. Otto’s mantle was taken up not by the chancellor of Germany, but by the Prime Minister of Hungary. Viktor Orbán had until recently been a self-avowed atheist; but this did not prevent him from doubting – much as Otto might have done – whether unbaptized migrants could ever truly be integrated. ‘This is an important question, because Europe and European culture have Christian roots.’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“While the differences between Anglo-French and German motivations, which we stressed earlier, remained distinct for soldiers and civilians during the entire war, the sensibilities of the British and French had moved toward the German [particularly regarding abandoning restraint with regard to methods.... The Western nations moved in the course of the war toward stronger social control but also toward a new spiritual liberality. Within this paradox, as the social and cultural welds seemed to split away from each other, would lie the essence of the modern experience.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Repeatedly, whether crashing along the canals of Tenochtitlan, or settling the estuaries of Massachusetts, or trekking deep into the Transvaal, the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity. Repeatedly, though, in the struggle to hold this arrogance to account, it was Christianity that had provided the colonized and enslaved with their surest voice. The paradox was profound. No other conquerors, carving out empires for themselves, had done so as the servants of a man tortured to death on the orders of a colonial official. No other conquerors, dismissing with contempt the gods of other peoples, had installed in their place an emblem of power so deeply ambivalent as to render problematic the very notion of power. No other conquerors, exporting an understanding of the divine peculiar to themselves, had so successfully persuaded peoples around the globe that it possessed a universal import. When, a month before his inauguration as president, Mandela traveled to the Transvaal, there to celebrate Easter in the holy city of Moria, it was as a Savior who had died for the whole world that he saluted Christ. ‘Easter is a festival of human solidarity, because it celebrates the fulfillment of the Good News! The Good News born by our risen Messiah who chose not one race, who chose not one country, who chose not one language, who chose not one tribe, who chose all of humankind!’ Ironically, however, even as Mandela was hailing Easter as a festival for all the world, elites in the old strongholds of Christendom were growing ever more nervous of using such language.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Like Nietzsche, the Islamic state saw in the pieties of western civilization – its concern for the suffering, its prating about human rights – a source of terrible and sickly power. Like [the Marquis de] Sade, they understood that the surest blow they could strike against it was a display of exultant and unapologetic cruelty. The cross had to be redeemed from Christianity. In the Qur’an it served as it had served under the Caesars: as an emblem of righteously sanctioned punishment. ‘The penalty for those who wage war against God and his messenger, and to strive in fomenting corruption on the earth, is that they be killed or crucified...’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Dorgelès called the [World War I] trenches ‘this huge confessional’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Why does the perfect social state always seem to be a state of perfect boredom stiffened only by self-righteousness?”

G.K. Chesterton in London Magazine August 1924, quoted in “Why Do You Ask Me Rhetorical Questions? 6” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“You should be more afraid of a stupid man than of an evil one.”

Christina, Queen of Sweden (1626-1689) [emailed by a friend and quoted for instance at https://www.azquotes.com/quote/966702]