Christopher Lascelles > Quotes

“As William Bernstein describes in ‘A Splendid Exchange’, ‘The Arabs, invigorated by their conquests, experienced a cultural renaissance that extended to many fields; the era’s greatest literature, art, mathematics, and astronomy was not found in Rome, Constantinople, or Paris, but in Damascus, Baghdad and Cordova.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“even great progress is unable to prevent man’s inhumanity to man.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“western notions of medicine were based largely on superstition and exorcism in contrast to the Arab’s advanced clinical training and understanding of surgery, pharmacology and epidemiology. Westerners had no knowledge of ‘hygiene’ and sanitation’.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Pizarro then reneged on his promises and murdered the king (although not before christening him into the Catholic faith!).”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“In the end it was precisely the instability which Europeans had been trying unsuccessfully to evade for so long which had turned out to be their greatest strength. Their wars, their incessant internal struggles, their religious quarrels, all these had been the unfortunate, but necessary condition, of the intellectual growth which had led them, unlike their Asiatic neighbours, to develop the metaphysical and inquiring attitudes towards nature which, in turn, had given them the power to transform and control the worlds in which they lived.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“By the time the slave trade ended, the Caribbean had taken an estimated 50 percent of the roughly fifteen million African slaves transported to the Americas as cheap labour over a three hundred year period. In fact, up until the beginning of the 19th century, the majority of immigrants to the Americas were African.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Surely it is not unreasonable to expect the head of the Catholic Church to act in a manner that is relevant to the teaching, morals and principles of the individual claimed as its founder?”
― Christopher Lascelles, Pontifex Maximus: A Short History of the Popes

“Spain was also determined to stamp out any free thought or intellectual activity that might challenge Catholicism. With this aim, books were banned,76 students were forbidden to study abroad, and any foreign thought was, by its very nature, unwelcome.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Much of the Islamic world, formerly a beacon of progress in a backward world, became seemingly trapped by the limits of scripture, unprepared to accept the value of any teaching or development not expressly mentioned in the Qur’an.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“A person in 1750 could travel no faster than Caesar had travelled 1,800 years previously.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“crossing the Rubicon”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“The Roman Empire at its height was the largest empire the world had ever witnessed.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Although they still officially deny it, the Turks used the cover of a news blackout to wipe out much of their Christian Armenian population, mainly on forced death marches in which large numbers died of starvation and exhaustion. It is estimated that between 1 million to 1.5 million Armenians and other ethnic minorities were killed or forced to flee between 1915 and 1923 in what was to be the first of many genocides of the 20th century.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“the end was almost too perfect: Gorbachev’s Soviet pen would not write and he had to borrow one from a CNN cameraman.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“if one lived a moral life, was mindful of one’s actions, and developed wisdom, he taught, it was possible to dispel ignorance, rid oneself of desire and reach Nirvana, or a state without suffering.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“The Mayans developed several incredibly precise calendars without the use of any scientific instruments. Obsessed with time-keeping, they were even able to predict solar eclipses. One of these calendars prophesied doomsday, or the end of the world, on 21st December 2012, which fortunately did not occur!”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Philosophy comes from the Greek words ‘philo’ and ‘sophia’, meaning ‘love’ and ‘wisdom’, and democracy comes from the words ‘demos’ and ‘kratia’, meaning ‘people’ and ‘rule’.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Jews would eventually be expelled from France in 1394 and Spain in 1492, having already been expelled from England in 1290.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“As the Ottomans grew in power in the Middle East, China missed its opportunity to become the major global power.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Many previous societies have collapsed from over-exploiting their own resources. This is exactly what we are doing now, but on a much larger, global scale. We know the problems that we are storing up for ourselves, but our constant short-term approach and lack of political will to make unpopular decisions mean that we do nothing about it. We live in a state of denial.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Blaise Pascal”
― Christopher Lascelles, Pontifex Maximus: A Short History of the Popes

“it has been estimated that communism was the direct cause of over 100 million deaths in the 20th century or, to put it into perspective, more than those killed in all the wars, revolutions and conflicts in the entire century combined.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Despite the increasing strength of Britain during the”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Voltaire, rightly commented that it was ‘neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire’.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“The major killers of humanity through the centuries – smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, plague, cholera and AIDS – are all thought to have evolved originally in animals and then transferred over to humans via fleas or other carriers.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Fearful of change, the Iberian peninsula77 failed to develop at the same pace as the rest of Europe and missed out on the Reformation which had done so much to develop the continent.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“The 21st century is no exception, with Swine Flu and Bird Flu acting as nasty reminders that rearing animals in close quarters – and inhumanely – might still come back to bite us (no pun intended).”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“Africa”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“The K-T Extinction of 65 million years ago destroyed the dinosaurs that had already roamed our planet for close to 150 million years.  This puts the six or seven thousand years since the appearance of the first proper human civilisations into perspective.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World

“in AD 732, when the king of the Franks, Charles Martel, otherwise known as ‘Charles the Hammer’, and a coalition of troops under his leadership, defeated an Umayyad invading army near Poitiers in France. While there is disagreement as to the size of this invading army, world history may have turned out very differently indeed had it not been defeated.”
― Christopher Lascelles, A Short History of the World