Timothy

“Not being interested in other cultures is the normal state of mankind.”
― Bernard Lewis (Author), The Muslim Discovery of Europe

“Classical Islamic civilization had long passed its prime when the Mongols arrived on the scene in the thirteenth century, and was already in an advance state of what most historians would call decline.”
― Bernard Lewis (Author)

“The social institutions and attitudes inherited from earlier times and maintained with increasing rigidity made it difficult to adapt to changing circumstances or to create new political and economic institutions which would facilitate such an adaption. An attitude towards unbelievers that varied from condescension in good times, to hostility and mistrust in bad times, made it difficult to learn from them, or even to understand them, at a time when it was the West, and not as previously the Islamic world, that had something to teach.”
― Bernard Lewis (Author), The Arabs in History

“A devoted cleric, he [Lenin] argued, is far more influential than an egotistical and immoral one. [p. 51]”
― Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties