Posts in History
Words Worth Noting - September 22, 2022

“There is no law of geography which dictates that it would be impossible for all the inhabitable areas of the earth to lie in latitudes, and be subject to physical conditions, of the type that produced the Asian empires…. Indeed, how can any ‘rigorous’ theory account for Britain’s being an island, a fact that has certainly contributed most importantly to the world’s social and political development. Its insulation was the merest accident on any rational time scale, dating from some ten thousand years ago, a geological instant.”

Robert Conquest in Reflections on a Ravaged Century, critiquing the narrowness of Marx’s development theory.

Words Worth Noting - September 19, 2022

‘‘My very dear sons, it is better never to undertake any high enterprise than to abandon it when once begun….’”

Pope Gregory, in reply to an appeal from St. Augustine of Canterbury and others to be excused from attempting to evangelize the English nation because “they were appalled at the idea of going to a barbarous, fierce, and pagan nation, of whose very language they were ignorant”, quoted in Bede A History of the English Church and People