Christopher Hill > Quotes

“History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.”
― Christopher Hill

“Each generation ... rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe.”
― Christopher Hill

“The radicals assumed that acting was more important than speaking. Talking and writing books, Winstanley insisted, is 'all nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.' It is a thought worth pondering by those who read books about the seventeenth-century radicals, no less than by those who write them. Were you doers or talkers only? Bunyan asked his generation. What canst thou say?”
― Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

“The child is father to the man” is a Romantic riddle that turns worldly hierarchy on its head. It means that the child is in some sense the superior of the man; the child is wiser than the man. Ironically, the eventual broad acceptance of this truth did not so much liberate the Victorian bourgeois as it haunted them and gave them a bad conscience. They sensed that the poets were right.”
― Christopher Hill, Into the Mystic: The Visionary and Ecstatic Roots of 1960s Rock and Roll

“In the fifteenth century the mere fact of owning and reading the Bible in English was presumptive evidence of heresy.”
― Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution

“Your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity...Peace is their ruin,...by war they are enriched...Peace is their war, peace is their poverty”
― Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

“Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.”
― Christopher Hill

“There had been moments when it seemed as though from the ferment of radical ideas a culture might emerge which might be different both from the traditional aristocratic culture and from the bourgeois culture of the protestant ethic which replaced it. We can discern shadows of what this counter culture might have been like. rejecting private property for communism, religion for rationalistic and materialistic pantheism, the mechanical philosophy for dialectical science, asceticism for unashamed enjoyment of the good things of the flesh, it might have achieved unity through a federation of communities, each based on the fullest respect for the individual. Its ideal would have been economic self-sufficiency, not world trade or world domination. The economic significant consequence of the Puritan emphasis on sin was the compulsion on labour, to save, to accumulate, which contributed so much to making the Industrial Revolution possible in England. Ranters simply rejected this; Quakers ultimately came to accept it. Only Winstanley put forward an alternative....... ...It came nearest to realisation in the Digger communities, which might have given the counter-culture some economic base.”
― Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

“Our holy prelates [say that God’s Word] causeth insurrection and teacheth the people to disobey...and moveth them to rise against their princes, and to make all common, and to make havoc of other men’s goods. William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man”
― Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution

“Your slavery is their liberty, your poverty is their prosperity...Peace is their ruin,...by war they are enriched...Peace is their war, peace is their poverty.”
― Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

“They questioned whether any heaven or hell existed apart from this life: heaven was when men laugh and are merry, hell was sorrow, grief and pain.”
― Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down Radical Ideas During The English Revolution