“All this is the result of your imprudence and stupidity.”
A letter from Pope Gregory II to Emperor Leo III in 727 AD excerpted in Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300 [also from my “Don’t mince words, Bones” file]
“For as long as people have been writing, there have been other people that want to prevent that writing from reaching the public. Around 600BC King Jehoiakim of Judah burnt a scroll containing a prophecy he did not like. Plato supposedly loathed work by Democritus, another philosopher, and sought to have it destroyed. (Ironically in his dialogues he warns of ‘the danger of becoming misologists’—ie, people who hate reasoning or ideas.)”
Rachel Lloyd, “Deputy culture editor” in “The Economist this weekend” email Feb. 22, 2025 [the big point here being the word “misologist”].
“The strong minded governor of Massachusetts, William Shirley, took to emulating Cato about Carthage: ‘Delenda est Canada’ (Canada must be destroyed).”
This re the New France militia in the War of the Austrian Succession, in Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present
In my latest Epoch Times column I say from coast to coast Canada is turning away from trusting the people and abandoning self-government for meddlesome ineffective presumption.
“The general picture of Syria under Roman rule is one of prosperity more continuous than in any other province. Most of the workers were freeman, except in domestic service. The upper classes were Hellenized, the lower remained Oriental; in the same town Greek philosophers rubbed elbows with temple prostitutes and emasculated priests; and even till Hadrian children were now and then offered as sacrifices to the gods.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“Our knowledge of the Lyons persecutions [in or very shortly after 177 AD] comes from a letter of ‘the servants of Christ at Lugdunum and Vienna in Gaul, to the brethren in Asia and Phrygia,’ preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, v, 1. Some exaggeration may have crept into the report.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“Protestants had been insisting on the correctness of their own readings of scripture, their own understandings of God’s purpose, since the time of Luther’s confrontation with Cajetan. Now, in the person of Spinoza, this tradition had begun to cannibalise itself.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“‘The two greatest problems in history,’ says a brilliant scholar of our time, are ‘how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall.’ We may come nearer to understanding them if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars. Christian writers were keenly appreciative of this decay.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ