“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

On Forum Daily News with Hal Roberts I talk about how not to react to Alberta’s separatist movement.

“When there are people who espouse the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy or the Tate murders or the Marin County Courthouse kidnappings and killings or the University of Wisconsin bombing and killing as ‘revolutionary acts,’ then we are dealing with people who are merely hiding psychosis behind a political mask.”

Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [he also warns that it is counterproductive, disgusting and scaring normal people].

“Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul...”

“Thomas Paine” quoted as 2nd of 3 header quotations in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [before even the table of contents].

Nietzsche was “[c]ondemned by many as the most dangerous thinker who had ever lived, others hailed him as a prophet. There were many who considered him both. Nietzsche was not the first to have become a byword for atheism, of course. No one, though – not Spinoza, not Darwin, not Marx – had ever before dared to gaze quite so unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilization. ‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’ Nietzsche’s loathing for those who imagined otherwise was intense. Philosophers he scorned as secret priests. Socialists, communists, democrats: all were equally deluded. ‘Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing!’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”

Lincoln's First Inaugural, quoted in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“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

“In a world where everything is so inter related that one feels helpless to know where or how grab hold and act, defeat sets in; for years there have been people who found society too overwhelming and have withdrawn, concentrated on ‘doing their own thing.’ Generally we have put them into mental hospitals and diagnosed them as schizophrenics. If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.... As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be – it is necessary to begin where the world is if we're going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system. There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.”

“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals