Bible and Sword Quotes

“Guides were Franciscan monks, sole custodians of the holy places after 1230, who recited the history and traditions associated with each town or monument or site of Biblical events to parties of visitors as they arrived. More”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“The history of the Jews is…intensely peculiar in the fact of having given the Western world its concept of origins and monotheism, its ethical traditions, and the founder of its prevailing religion, yet suffering dispersion, statelessness, and ceaseless persecution, and finally in our times nearly successful genocide, dramatically followed by fulfillment of the never-relinquished ream of return to their homeland. Viewing this strange and singular history one can not escape the impression that it must contain some special significance for the history of mankind, that in some way, whether one believes in divine purpose or inscrutable circumstance, the Jews have been singled out to carry the tale of human fate.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“For, as Professor Turner has pointed out, “history originated as myth” and becomes a “social memory” to which men can appeal, “knowing it will provide justification for their present actions or convictions.” If”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“The road to India, the Suez Canal, the oil fields of Mosul, the whole complex of political and strategic requirements that drew Britain into Palestine in 1918, began with the enterprise of the Elizabethan merchant adventurers.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“TO BE “THE SEWER OF CHRISTENDOM and drain all the discords out of it” was the primary function of the Crusades,”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“This was the Evangelical Revival that now began to take hold on the propertied class, who, frightened by what was happening in France, were anxiously mending their fences, spiritual as well as political. To escape rationalism’s horrid daughter, revolution, they were only too willing to be enfolded in the anti-intellectual embrace of Evangelicalism, even if it demanded faith and good works and a willing suspension of disbelief.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“Puritanism, he said, was a reaction to the loss of moral fiber that accompanied the Renaissance.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“It might be the destiny of the Jewish race,” he said, “to be the bridge between Asia and Europe, to bring the spirituality of Asia to Europe and the vitality of Europe to Asia.” At”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“The author of IRR, who worshipped the King, said he had the valor of Hector, the magnanimity of Achilles, the liberality of Titus, the eloquence of Nestor, and the prudence of Ulysses; that he was the equal of Alexander and not inferior to Roland. But later historians tend to picture him rather as a remorseless, kindless villain. He was probably not a pleasant or a lovable character; none of the Plantagenets were. But a great soldier and a great commander he certainly was. He possessed that one quality without which nothing else in a commander counts: the determination to win. To this everything else—mercy, moderation, tact—was sacrificed. The avarice that so horrifies his critics was not simple greed: it was a quartermaster’s greed for his army. His massacre of the prisoners was not simple cruelty, but a deliberate reminder to Saladin to keep faith with the terms agreed to, which that great opponent understood and respected.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“Have we,” he wondered, “conceived a merely human project and then imagined it to be a decree of the Almighty?”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“Cromwell. The door was flung open. In stalked the Protector, disgusted once more with the inability of human weaklings to come to the point, to get action, to see what he wanted and let him have it. Was it not, he berated them, every Christian’s duty to receive the Jews into England, the only nation where religion was taught in its full purity, and “not to exclude them from the light and leave them among false teachers, Papists and idolaters”? This argument silenced objectors among the clergy. Then he poured his contempt upon the City men. “Can ye really be afraid that this mean and despised people should be able to prevail in trade over the merchants of England, the noblest and most esteemed merchants of the whole world?” “Thus he went on,” says an observer, “till he had silenced them too.… I never heard a man speak so well in his life.” But”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“Inevitably, as hatred of monarchy was added to hatred of episcopacy, they were led to republicanism.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“Persian poet said, the rose blooms reddest where some buried Caesar bled. The”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“Wherever the Reformation took hold the Bible replaced the Pope as the final spiritual authority.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“But with that burst of the fairness that he can never repress, he admits that conversion is unlikely as long as Christians exclude Jews from the community: “There must be first conversing with them before there can be converting them.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“It is clearer now that no anti-Semitic government in any country has ever helped its scapegoats to leave by any other door than death.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“For history, as Napoleon so succinctly put it, “is a fable agreed upon.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“The”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“Publication of the Humble Address provoked a tumult of controversy in which the pros were loudly outpamphleteered by the cons. All the old charges were revived and some new ones, including the charge that Cromwell was a Jew and that the Jews were going to buy St. Paul’s and the Bodleian Library. They were an ignoble race whom even God had constantly to chastise for their wickedness; their exile was divine punishment for the killing of Christ (and the Puritans would reap the same punishment for killing King Charles); if recalled to England they would vilify the Christian religion and cause a movement away from Christian principles and customs, falsify coinage, create unemployment, ruin English merchants, and destroy foreign trade.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“As guardians of a continuity of religious and racial tradition” the Zionists were, Balfour decided, “a great conservative force in world politics.” Immediately”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“the Archimedean point where the lever can be applied.” At”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“But to “settle” the Eastern Question was beyond even Disraeli’s power—beyond, it seems, any human power, for it still haunts the world today.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“Oversimplified perhaps, this in essence is the problem known to nineteenth-century diplomacy as the Eastern Question.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“(Present-day anthropologists defend the thesis that the American Indians were in fact originally Mongolians who crossed over by the Bering Strait.)”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour

“This suggests that Palestine already had begun to suffer the soil erosion that during the centuries of Arab cultivation reduced it from the one-time land of milk and honey to a stony goat pasture. Saewulf”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour