Great Throughts Treasury

"In many ways the ideals of Renaissance times are part of our permanent cultural heritage, as are the matchless works of art and the enduring monuments those rich and fruitful times produced."

"In a practical sense, the English imperialist spasm [c.1875-1914] was an attempt to escape from Britain?s economic difficulties, an easy alternative to tariffs, and still more, to the distasteful business of becoming an efficient manufacturing nation."

"In addition to the forces of technological change in the world of painting, there was a further fact, more properly belonging to the history of ideas that was of immense importance in giving the Renaissance its peculiar dynamism. This was the notion of progress. It is of the nature of humankind to wish to improve things and to better out condition, and all societies have possessed this wish to some extent. But some societies make it a cardinal principle of existence, while other put different considerations first. The ancient Egyptians did not seem to be interested in progress. By contrast, the Greeks sought self-improvement and set targets to be attained. They infected the Romans, certainly under the Republic. But under the empire, the authorities became more concerned with order and stability than with advantageous changes. That had a deadening effect on their economy and it also in time effected the arts... From the 14th century onwards, and especially in Italy, the notion grew that modern men should not only learn all that the ancients had to teach in the days of Rome's glory, but should build on that knowledge to reach even higher standards of knowledge and writing, of architecture, sculpture and art."

"In particular, I want to focus on the moral and judgmental credentials of intellectuals to tell mankind how to conduct itself. How did they run their own lives? With what degree of rectitude did they behave to family, friends and associates? Were they just in their sexual and financial dealings? Did they tell, and write, the truth? And how have their own systems stood up to the test of time and praxis?"

"In the middle decades of the 19th century, England became the workshop of the world; and in the process, helped to create rival workshops throughout it. In the 1850s Britain produced two-thirds of the world?s coal, half its iron, more than half its steel, half its cotton cloth, 49 per cent of its hardware, virtually all of its machine tools."

"In the century following the 1560s England had advanced from scientific backwardness through a technological revolution - based chiefly on instruments of measurement - and at the outset of the Civil War was technically the most advanced country in the world."

"In the 19th century we witness a great intestinal struggle among the English between the native forces of reform and reaction, light and darkness, a struggle which was ultimately inconclusive, because if reform eventually triumphed, it did so only after the expenditure of irreplaceable energy, and after delays which were to prove disastrous."

"In the last half-century, over 100 completely new independent states have come into existence. Israel is the only one whose creation can fairly be called a miracle. It could even be argued that Israel is the most characteristic single product, and its creation the quintessential event, of this century. Certainly, you cannot study Israel without traveling the historical highroads and many of the byroads of the times, beginning with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. That great watershed between an age of peace and moderation and one of violence and extremism set the pattern for all that followed, and marked a turning point as well in the fortunes of Zionism. The violence bred by the searing years 1914-18 also decisively changed the moral climate of Europe, again with fateful results for the future Jewish state. In the wake of the war, extremist regimes seized power and ruled by force and terror - first in Russia, then in Italy, and finally in Germany. The transformation of Germany from the best-educated society in Europe into a totalitarian race-state was, of course, determinative. Although the anti-Semites of Central Europe had always treated Jews with varying degrees of cruelty and injustice, up to and including murderous pogroms and expulsion, it was only with Hitler that actual extermination became a possible program. The outbreak of World War II provided the covering darkness to make it not just possible but practical."

"In the year AD 410 Britain ceased to be a Roman colony and became an independent state. The inhabitants of the offshore island - or rather the settled lowlands of it which we now call England - shook off the shackles of a vast European system, which tied it politically, economically and militarily to the Continental land-mass, and took charge of their own destinies."

"In the Sixties everyone hailed the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain?s office and the result of the Lady Chatterley case as the final end of official censorship. In fact there is now more censorship in Britain than at any time since the early 19th century, if not before, and it is increasing rapidly. The old law on blasphemy is now discredited and is obviously not being enforced... But the new law replacing it will be much more severe on every aspect of religious comment and many other matters."

"Ireland is sure to do the opposite of anything Britain does."

"Ireland had been the grave of English military reputations. It did not destroy Cromwell's: his operations there were masterly and highly successful. But it has proved the grave of his moral reputation. There is no doubt that he took the view (shared by Spenser, Bacon and Milton) that the Irish were culturally inferior and their subjection necessary. In 1649 he believed the Irish would be used to overthrow the Revolution... Yet at one point there was a distinct possibility that the native Irish might cooperate with parliamentary forces in opposing the Irish Protestant royalists... But under pressure from the Catholic clergy, acting on papal instructions, the Irish turned against the New Model... It is a curious fact that in 1651, when General Monck sacked Dundee, he killed as many people as Cromwell in Drogheda, and with far less military justification; yet the episode is rarely mentioned."

"It is a curious fact about human nature that many people actually seem to want to believe in an approaching catastrophe. In the Dark and Middle Ages - indeed right up to the seventeenth century - religious seers would always collect a substantial following if they predicted the end of the world, especially if they gave a specific date for it. When the date came and went, and nothing happened, human credulity did not disappear. It re-emerged promptly when the next persuasive prophet mounted his soapbox. The ecological panic of our times is driven by exactly the same emotional needs. Indeed it is yet another example of how, during the twentieth century, the declining religious impulse has been replaced by ... secular substitutes, which are often far more irrational and destructive. The religious impulse - with all the excesses of zealotry and intolerance it can produce - remains powerful, but expresses itself in secular substitutes."

"It could be argued that the growing reluctance of gifted men and women to become candidates for national office explained the presidency of Bill Clinton."

"In view of the claims of clergymen to a separate caste status, their enjoyment of between a quarter and a fifth of the wealth of the country, and their lack of a recognizable role in society: they were parasites and were seen to be parasites, and public opinion at all levels of society could be easily marshalled against them... The Church was in part the architect of its own destruction. Powerful prelates had never hesitated to misuse Church property, and even to grab it, with the barest show of legality, for their own purposes. Cardinal Wolsey was merely the last of a long line of ecclesiastical confiscators when he suppressed a number of small religious houses to found his Cardinal College (now Christ Church) at Oxford. There was nothing new about the dissolution of the monasteries: it was the culmination of a long English tradition, inaugurated with the approval of the Pope... The case against the regular clergy was not so much that they were corrupt (though some were) as that they were idle: about 8000 men and women sitting on one-eighth of the country's wealth."

"Irish freedom, said Daniel O'Connell, was not worth the shedding of a single drop of English blood."

"It is a curious fact that the most important debate in English political history took place not in the House of Commons but in the 15th century parish church of St Mary in Putney. There, on 28 October 1647, and for the next two weeks, a group of about 40 men met in informal conclave, and proceeded to invent modern politics - to invent, in fact, the public framework of the world in which nearly 3,000 million people now live."

"It is a sad comment on human societies that they can usually be persuaded to accept bribery as a system of government, provided the circle of corruption is wide enough. This became possible in early 18th century Britain with the expansion of the State. But if the circle was large, it still had very definite limits, and excluded whole categories of people: one might argue that it broke down at the end of the 18th century because, with the growth of population, the area of exclusion became intolerably large. But it also excluded whole nations. Thanks to the Act of Union, Walpole found it desirable to bring Scotland into the system, for the votes it exercised in both Houses of Parliament were valuable and worth buying. But Ireland was rigorously excluded, its own parliament was emasculated and, of course, it had no votes to offer at Westminster. Rich and poor, Catholic or Protestant, the Irish resented the unfairness of it all... but Ireland lay under the shadows of English guns. With America it was a different matter. America, too, had no votes to deliver at Westminster; she, too, was largely excluded from the spoils systems, but America was 3000 miles, and six weeks, away from the sources of English authority. This made a crucial difference, especially when, for a brief moment, England lost absolute control of the sea."

"It is worth remembering that Hitler was voted into office, quite lawfully and constitutionally, by what was then the best-educated people in the world, and that he and his Nazis always scored higher ratings among the educated young, and among university students and graduates ? and professors ? than among the population as a whole. As Hitler is still demonized rather than allowed to emerge as a historical character to be studied, we hear little of his gifts... (yet) it was precisely Hitler?s gifts which made him so dangerous and so uniquely evil."

"It is against this background of murderous zeal that we must place the achievement of Elizabeth in stabilizing the religious system of England on a basis of moderation, common sense and tolerance... It was an enduring achievement, too, for the Elizabethan religious settlement survived all the shocks of the next century, and emerged into modern times roughly the same article... Elizabeth felt that religion was too dangerous an element in the body politic to be safely left to clergymen. It should be the servant of the public, not its master. It should provide comfort in an harsh and painful world, not add to the troubles of society by provoking controversy and division... This was a thoroughly English approach. A man's religion was a matter between himself and God; its outward and organization were a matter for the due constitutional process of law... The English have never made the mistake of saddling themselves with a written constitution. In the mid-16th century the pressure of the times left them no alternative but to adopt a religious constitution."

"It was part of Rousseau?s vanity that he believed himself incapable of base emotions. ?I feel too superior to hate.? ?I love myself too much to hate anybody."

"It was Queen Mary's own actions which killed Roman Catholicism as the majority English religion... The English were not fanatical about religion, and regarded execution as a fair professional hazard for those who were. But what struck contemporaries was the sheer scale of Marian persecution. There had been nothing like it seen in England before. It had the flavor of Continental excess. Over three years, Mary burnt just under 300 people, including 60 women. Moreover, these public killings were concentrated heavily in the opinion-forming areas: London and the Home Counties... Mary must take prime responsibility for the burnings. Her husband, Phillip II, was against the policy; so was his ambassador in London, Simon Reynard, who said that at least the executions should be carried out secretly. But the English, including Mary, felt that to hold executions in public was a guarantee of liberty. As late as the 1860s, public executions were defended (e.g. by Palmerston) on the grounds that to give the executive the right to put people to death in secret would open the door to tyranny... The killing sickened even some of Mary's strongest clerical supporters, and long before her death it was evident to all that her policy not only had failed but had inflicted grievous damage on her cause. The hatred her persecutions aroused became an important fact of English history for a very long time. They cofirmed to most English people that their anti-foreign, anti-papal views were not just prejudices but rooted in a sound instinct for self-preservation... Until Mary's reign there was a real prospect of a multi-religious community emerging in England. By her death this was no longer possible."

"It was the very competitiveness of the independent Italian cities, and the regimes and rulers who strove to bolster their power with the embellishments of scholarship and art, that gave the Renaissance its thrust. It was one of the few times in human history when success in the world's game ? the struggle for military supremacy and political dominion ? was judged at least in part on cultural performance. Often cultural patronage was the homage that vice paid to virtue."

"Julian recognized that the strength of the orthodox Church rested to a great extent on the imperial discrimination in its favour. According to Ammianus, he tried to atomize the Church by ending the system:"

"Let me assure readers I am totally without prejudice. I do not prejudge. I have formed my dislikes on the basis of long experience. I tried explaining this once to James Baldwin, who complained to me that it was sheer race prejudice and homophobia which made people dislike him: "No, James, it is not prejudice, it is actual experience of how awful you are." He said, "What experience have you had of prejudice?" I replied, "Listen, old sod, if, like me, you were born in England red-haired, left-handed and a Roman Catholic, there?s nothing you don?t know about prejudice." At this point he stumped off in a rage."

"Margaret Thatcher famously asked "Who governs Britain?" as unions struggled for power. By 1980, everyone knew the answer: Thatcher governs. Once the union citadel had been stormed, Thatcher quickly discovered that every area of the economy was open to judicious reform. Even as the rest of Europe toyed with socialism and state ownership, she set about privatizing the nationalized industries, which had been hitherto sacrosanct, no matter how inefficient. It worked. British Airways, an embarrassingly slovenly national carrier that very seldom showed a profit, was privatized and transformed into one of the world's best and most profitable airlines. British Steel, which lost more than a billion pounds in its final years as a state concern, became the largest steel company in Europe. By the mid-1980s, privatization was a new term in world government, and by the end of the decade more than 50 countries, on almost every continent, had set in motion privatization programs, floating loss-making public companies on the stock markets and in most cases transforming them into successful private-enterprise firms. Even left-oriented countries, which scorned the notion of privatization, began to reduce their public sector on the sly. Governments sent administrative and legal teams to Britain to study how it was done. It was perhaps Britain's biggest contribution to practical economics in the world since J.M. Keynes invented 'Keynesianism', or even Adam Smith published 'The Wealth of Nations'."

"Labor today is so deeply anti-creative, so organically and instinctually lacking in any positive impulses, that it actually likes banning things or people, for its own sake. It's motto is: accentuate the negative. To ban, to boycott, to embargo, to exclude, blacklist, close down, shut up, silence, censure - these are the things which now come naturally to it, perhaps the only things it really knows how to do."

"King Henry II (r. 1154-89) was motivated (in his punishing schedule of administrative and judicial undertakings) only in a superficial degree by personal ambition. What made him a great and characteristic English statesman was a passionate regard for public order; and it was to this that the English people responded. No race on earth has such a consistent and rooted hatred of unauthorized violence. Extremely violent by nature and instinct, their political capacity for self-knowledge has always placed the highest premium on the control and subjugation of these terrible forces within them. From Anglo-Saxon times to the present, English history is the long record of the struggle for self-mastery, the remorseless, often unsuccessful, attempt to release themselves from the drug of violence. It has been, on the whole, a remarkably successful struggle; but for this drug there is no such thing as a wholly successful cure, and constant vigilance will be needed so long as the English race lasts. At any rate, Henry II was unusually well attuned to this English preoccupation. He had violent instincts himself; equally, he was a passionate self-disciplinarian."

"Medieval Europe had no such luxury in the use of manpower. The Black Death, in the mid-14th century, by reducing the population of Western Europe by 25 to 30% made labor scarcer still. There were strong incentives to improve labor-saving machinery and develop alternative sources of power to human muscles. Some of the medieval inventions were very simple, though important, like the wheelbarrow."

"More can thus be presented as adumbrating modern internationalist doctrine, in which nations voluntarily relinquish portions of their sovereignty to provide a common fund of authority for such organs as the United Nations or European Economic Community. But equally he can be seen as upholding an ancient and ramshackle structure, whose reality had never corresponded to its ideals, and which was now breaking up under ths stress of nationalism... The current of the times was against More. His European Christendom was a mirage. Continental Catholicism was not an international community, operating by a consensus or majority vote, but the helpless prize in a power-struggle between emergent nations. In 1534 orthodox Christendom was coterminous with the interests of the House of Habsburg, whose head was identified with Spanish imperialism."

"Most Englishmen understood the international implications of the Reformation no more clearly than the Duke of Suffolk. though, like him, they sensed them instinctively. But the two cleverest men in England, Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, for the point. They saw it as a historic choice in foreign policy, no less than in religion... More was a European, Cromwell an English nationalist... To More, England was not an island but part of a great Continental community; it could not cut itself adrift by a unilateral act; it was bound to European Christendom by an indissoluble spiritual treaty... It was nothing to him that a majority of the English people accepted separation; this was something no one nation could determine for itself. The supranational authority of the community overrode national self-interest. More, in fact, explicitly denied English sovereignty: "This realm, being but one member and small part of the Church, might not make a particular law dischargeable with the general law of Christ's holy Catholic Church, no more than the City of London, being but one poor member in respect of the whole realm, might make a law against an act of parliament.""

"Much historical research tends to obscure, rather than reveal, the truth; or, most depressing of all, to suggest that truth cannot be finally established, often on matters of outstanding importance. Just as astronomers seem unable to agree on the salient point of whether the universe is expanding, contracting, or standing still, so historians constantly reveal new areas of doubt, or violent disagreement, on points which had once seemed clear. Thus: the Roman city was a failure in Britain; it was a substantial success. The English population rose in the early 14th century; it fell dramatically... Similar black and white contrasting versions, held with angry tenacity and backed by massive documentation, envelop the nature of the Tudor monarchy, the origins of the Civil War, the loss of American colonies, the politics of George III's in England, and the origins and chronology of the industrial revolution, to mention only a few vital aspects of English history. Sometimes historians meet in seminar to debate their disagreements, not, as a rule, to much purpose. The layman can only survey the battlefield and make up his own mind about the honors of victory."

"Most people are resistant to ideas, especially new ones. But they are fascinated by character. Extravagance of personality is one way in which the pill can be sugared and the public induced to look at works dealing with ideas. The cruelty of ideas lies in the assumption that human beings can be bent to fit them."

"My grandfather used to say, "Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad". It is true: at this time of year, when days are short and dark, and one hardly dares to open the newspapers, I turn, not vainly either, to the great creators of the past for distraction, solace and help."

"No consideration should ever deflect us from the pursuit and recognition of truth, for that essentially is what constitutes civilization itself. Truth is much more than a means to expose the malevolent. It is the great creative force of civilization. For truth is knowledge; and a civilized man is one who, in Thomas Hobbes' words, has a 'perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge.' And so it is; for the pursuit of truth is our civilization's glory, and the joy we obtain from it is the nearest we shall approach to happiness, at least on this side of the grave. If we are steadfast in this aim, we need not fear the enemies of society."

"Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth."

"Oddly enough the divorce was the one issue on which Henry did not have public opinion behind him. It is a curious fact that English kings who quarrel with their wives always forfeit the general sympathy... Yet Henry was undoubtedly right to seek a divorce. As he saw it, in the light of recent English history, the provision of a male heir who would have communal backing for his title to the throne was essential to stable government, and was thus a necessity of State. It was intolerable that this vital national interest should be jeopardized by the actions of a foreign power, motivated not primarily by spiritual considerations, but by the needs of its own foreign policy. Any self-confident English king would have taken the same line. Moreover Henry believed, and may have been right to believe, that his marriage to Catherine was genuinely invalid... In 1527, Catherine, seeking to defend her marriage to Henry declared that she had never slept with Henry's elder brother Arthur. But she should have said so in 1503, and the original bull (of papal dispensation) would have been issued on a different basis. Hence the "technical impediment of public honesty", as Wolsey pointed out. Henry's argument from affinity was never strong; and it was weakened still further by the fact that he proposed to marry the sister, Anne Boleyn, of a women with whom, on his own admission, he had sexual relations: this also constituted a barrier on grounds of affinity: if his marriage to Catherine was invalid then so, for the same reason, would be his marriage to Anne. Whether he would have won his case if he had followed Wolsey's line of attack is, however, doubtful, Pope Clement could not afford to grant the divorce because he could not risk offending Catherine's nephew, the Emperor Charles V."

"Nobody who has five times been elected governor of a state like Arkansas can possibly be an honest man. [commenting on Bill Clinton]"

"One of the reasons why the Reformation was successful in England was that there was absolutely nothing new about it. All its elements ? anti-clericalism, anti-papalism, the exaltation of the Crown in spiritual matters, the envy of clerical property, even the yearning for doctrinal reform ? were deeply rooted in the English past. The breach with Rome, like the 1914 War, could have come at almost any time. The elements had been there for decades; only a spark was needed."

"One can probably learn more about Renaissance art from a detailed study of the industrious Verrocchio's shops that from any other single institution. The sop and its back-studios and outhouses were full of equipment of every kind, including plaster models of actual heads, arms, hands, feet and knees, which Verrocchio had made by a secret process of his own. These were used by himself and his assistants for sculpture and painting alike. Knowledge of the Verrocchio studio takes us behind the scenes of Renaissance art and shows how its high standards were based on intense discipline, careful preparation and a ruthless use of every mechanical aid that human ingenuity could devise. Behind this, in turn, was a passionate desire to make money as well as to produce the highest art."

"One might say that much of the history of England has been a conflict between xenophobia and avarice, with the latter, in the end, getting the upper hand. The irresistible force of the English desire for war meets the immovable object of the refusal to pay for it. The English love to inflict violence on foreigners; happily they love money more."

"OVER the past two hundred years the influence of intellectuals has grown steadily. Indeed, the rise of the secular intellectual has been a key factor in shaping the modern world. Seen against the long perspective of history it is in many ways a new phenomenon."

"One of the deepest illusions of the Sixties was that many forms of traditional authority could be diluted without fear of any consequences."

"Partly by accident, partly by instinct, partly by deliberate contrivance, he was the first intellectual systematically to exploit the guilt of the privileged. And he did it, moreover, in an entirely new way, by the systematic cult of rudeness. He was the prototype of that characteristic figure of the modern age, the Angry Young Man."

"Ronald Reagan?s essential achievement was to restore the will and self-confidence of the American people, while at the same time breaking the will and undermining the self-confidence of the small group of men who ran what he insisted on calling the 'Evil Empire' of Communism."

"Scanning the newspapers and absorbing with a mixture of incredulity and indignation the enormities they report, I conclude that what England lacks today is, quite simply, sense."

"Terence O'Neill, like the IRA, underestimated the power of sectarian feeling on either side of the religious dividing line. He believed in sweet reason; indeed, he once described himself to me as 'an 18th century politician trying to govern a 17th century country.'"

"The "Camera degli Sposi" is an authentic presentation of 15th-century court life, as the painter Mantegna actually witnessed it. There are no tricks about the figures. We see actual faces of real people ? 15th century Italians of the urban, courtly breed, whispering and hiding their thoughts, making honeyed speeches, dissimulating and orating, boasting and cutting a 'bella figura', strutting for effect and feigning every kind of emotion. As in all Mantegna's work, one learns a great deal because, though a master of illusionistic devices, he always tells the truth."

"The ancient Greeks had begun to explore certain entirely new political and scientific concepts when their cities and culture were absorbed in the imperialism of Rome."

"The administration of Woodrow Wilson was one of the great watersheds in American history. It was Wilson who first introduced Americans to big, benevolent government."