Patrick Marnham > Quotes

“The people of North America have little idea of religion, but they have strict public morality. The Latin people are without morality but they are highly religious.”
― Patrick Marnham, So Far from God: A Journey to Central America

“That was the end of my adventure in Central America. By the lakeshore in Granada, Nicaragua, I decided to turn for home. I wondered what Cortes would have said if, when he set out in the wake of Columbus, he had foreseen the beach outside Granada. He knew in his bones of the glory to come, would he have known about its eclipse? A Church without the True Cross, unable to protect its buildings from earthquake or idolatry; the gold and silver mines exhausted; the children of the Conquest reduced to beggary, placing their trust in the redundant theories of a Victorian economist; the empire overwhelmed by its own pagan and monstrous child. What a fool time has made of Cortes and his pretensions. He should have turned back to Cuba, to his dice and his saints and his women, and left the Indians with the Gods they honour, against all the odds, to this day.”
― Patrick Marnham, So Far from God: A Journey to Central America

“The people who hitched to Katmandu (and are doubtlessly still doing so, despite the usual reports of official prohibitions) seem to me to be of this sort, displaced persons, aimless couples without papers. They are ill-suited to play the role which they are conventionally given; that of proletarian playboys, outriders of a modern sub-culture, who intend, mainly through will-power, to end injustice and rule the world. For the most part they have chosen to be the sole inhabitants of private worlds, and their aspirations will not be found in the bazaars of the international youth movement, or of the global underground or any other such tentative organizations.”
― Patrick Marnham, Road to Katmandu

“Like a voice crying in the wilderness, we beg members of the foreign press to earn their wages honestly, and suggest that if they must lie they do so about their own countries, but not about El Salvador." (Notice displayed on the wall of the Ministry of Defence press office, El Salvador, 1983.)”
― Patrick Marnham, So Far from God: A Journey to Central America

“I led as secret a life from my parents as I possibly could’.”
― Patrick Marnham, Wild Mary: The Life Of Mary Wesley

“Horreurs’,”
― Patrick Marnham, Wild Mary: The Life Of Mary Wesley