Thomas Cahill
Thomas Cahill
Thomas Cahillis an American scholar and writer. He is best known for The Hinges of History series, a prospective seven-volume series in which the author recounts formative moments in Western civilization...
came history less orphan seems
I would like to restore, to the West, its genealogy, ... We have less and less history and it seems to me if you don't know where you came from you're an orphan and you don't know really who you are. You don't know your own name.
happened history
We think we know what history is. We think we know what happened and we don't.
real history soup
How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?
books people realize surprise
Every one of these books is going to have one really big surprise in it to make people say, 'I didn't realize that,'
bring early question reminds whatever whenever
Someone told me early on that whenever you get a question that you don't like, say, 'That reminds me ...' and go off on whatever you feel like, ... No one will ever bring you back.
across asia dust found japan massive organic pacific previous research roughly shown soil spring storms transport united united-states
Previous research has shown that every spring there are massive dust storms in Asia that transport soil eastward to Japan and across the Pacific to the United States. Now we've found that sulfate and organic aerosols are also present, and in roughly the same amounts.
inconsistent one-thing
Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent.
book hero europe
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.
book thinking talking
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.
reality thinking views
(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.
innovation facts affair
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.)
kings husband father
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.
children night justice
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.
mother children our-world
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.