Tom Holland > Quotes

“A myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound—as Tolkien, that devout Catholic, always argued—a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it—the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the Spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“I thought, gazing at the beauty of the landscape again, it is as though the fiend has prevailed against the angels, and fixed his throne in a heaven, to rule it as though it were Hell.”
― Tom Holland, Lord of the Dead

“It was an article of faith to the Romans that they were the most morally upright people in the world. How else was the size of their empire to be explained? Yet they also knew that the Republic's greatness carried its own risks. To abuse it would be to court divine anger. Hence the Roman's concern to refute all charges of bullying, and to insist they had won their empire purely in self-defense.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“The supreme achievement of the Jewish and Christian scholars of the age was to craft a history of their respective faiths that cast themselves as its rightful and inevitable culmination, and left anything that might have served to contradict such an impression out of the story altogether.”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“Whatever else it may be, the Qur’an is no work of history. Startlingly, were it not for all the commentaries elucidating its mysteries, all the biographies of the Prophet, and all the sprawling collections of hadiths—none of which, in the form we have them, pre-dates the beginning of the third century after the hijra—we would have only the barest reason to associate it with a man named”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“Gain cannot be made without loss to someone else.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Winners are the favourites of heaven.”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“The concept of natural law had no place in Torah. Yet Paul – as he struggled to define the law that he believed, in the wake of the crucifixion and the resurrection, to be written on the heart of all who acknowledged Christ as Lord – did not hesitate to adapt the teachings of the Greeks. The word he used for it – syneidesis – clearly signalled which philosophers in particular he had in mind. Paul, at the heart of his gospel, was enshrining the Stoic concept of conscience.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

“Never before had Jewish morality and Greek philosophy been fused to such momentous effect. That the law of the God of Israel might be read inscribed on the human heart, written there by his Spirit, was a notion that drew alike on the teachings of Pharisees and Stoics—and yet equally was foreign to them both.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Honour, in the Republic, had never been a goal in itself, only a means to an infinite end. And what was true of her citizens, naturally, was also true of Rome herself. For the generation that had lived through the civil wars, this was the consolation history gave them. Out of calamity could come greatness. Out of dispossession could come the renewal of a civilised order.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Just like any electorate, they delighted in making candidates for their favors sweat.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“This [for opposition leaders to claim royal lineage], in a world ruled by a republic, was what revolution had come to mean.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“Once the world of ideas has been transformed, reality cannot hold out for long. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“Only centuries after the death of Jesus—by which time, astonishingly, even the Caesars had been brought to acknowledge him as Christ—did his execution at last start to emerge as an acceptable theme for artists.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar: the last Jewish king ever to rule in Arabia.”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“As one Saudi professor sternly tells his co-religionists, “Only the writings of a practising Muslim are worthy of our attention.”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“[A] history of Islam's origins cannot be written without reference to the origins of Judaism and Christianity - and [...] a history of the origins of Judaism and Christianity cannot be written without reference to the world that incubated them both. The vision of God to which both rabbis and bishops subscribed, and which Muhammad's followers inherited, did not emerge out of nowhere. The monotheisms that would end up established as state religions from the Atlantic to central Asia had ancient, and possibly unexpected, roots. To trace them is to cast a searchlight across the entire civilisation of late antiquity.”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“Kavad himself, if obliged to fight on a Jewish holy day, had been known to request his adversaries for a temporary truce.”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“By AD 800, so redeemed was Arabic from the contempt in which it had once been held that its sound had come to rank as the very music of power, and its cursives as things of pure beauty, refined to a rare and exquisite perfection by the art of its calligraphers.

Among the Arabs, the written word was on the verge of becoming a mania. One scholar, when he died in 822, left behind him a library that filled a whole six hundred trunks.”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“The heroes of the Iliad, favourites of the gods, golden and predatory, had scorned the weak and downtrodden. So too, for all the honour that Julian paid them, had philosophers. The starving deserved no sympathy. Beggars were best rounded up and deported. Pity risked undermining a wise man’s self-control. Only fellow citizens of good character who, through no fault of their own, had fallen on evil days might conceivably merit assistance.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

“Enthusiasts for empire argued that Rome had a civilizing mission; that because her values and institutions were self-evidently superior to those of barbarians, she had a duty to propagate them; that only once the whole globe had been subjected to her rule could there be a universal peace.”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

“So highly did the Roman people prize this ideal of the common good that their name for it – res publica – served as shorthand for their entire system of government.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“Venerable the scorn of the Jews for the Ishmaelites may have been; but it was nothing like so savage as their loathing for the Romans.”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“In a city famed for its wealth, Paul proclaimed that it was the ‘low and despised in the world, mere nothings’,34 who ranked first. Among a people who had always celebrated the agon, the contest to be the best, he announced that God had chosen the foolish to shame the wise, and the weak to shame the strong. In a world that took for granted the hierarchy of human chattels and their owners, he insisted that the distinctions between slave and free, now that Christ himself had suffered the death of a slave, were of no more account than those between Greek and Jew.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

“We always want what we’re not allowed.”
― Tom Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

“To hail a religion for its compatibility with a secular society was decidedly not a neutral gesture. Secularism was no less bred of the sweep of Christian history than were Orban's barbed-wire fences.

Naturally, for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be admitted. The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had become skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences. A doctrine such as that of human rights was far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe could be kept concealed. The insistence of United Nations agencies on "the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man” was a necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than a merely Western, jurisdiction. Secularism, in an identical manner, depended on the care with which it covered its tracks. If it were to be embraced by Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus as a neutral holder of the ring between them and people of other faiths, then it could not afford to be seen as what it was: a concept that had little meaning outside of a Christian context. In Europe, the secular had for so long been secularised that it was easy to forget its ultimate origins. To sign up to its premises was unavoidably to become just that bit more Christian. Merkel, welcoming Muslims co Germany, was inviting them to take their place in a continent that was not remotely neutral in its understanding of religion: a continent in which the division of church and state was absolutely assumed to apply to Islam”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“stories of the Virgin being succoured by a friendly palm tree had actually been a Christian tradition for centuries, and seem in turn to have derived from a legend told by the pagan Greeks, was blithely ignored—as, of course, it was bound to be.”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“Only a few prefer liberty—the majority seek nothing more than fair masters. Sallust, Histories”
― Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic