Patricia Crone Quotes

#1. One can be deeply influenced by people to whom one is utterly hostile

Patricia Crone

#2. Reincarnation offers a better justification of evil than anything monotheism can offer, but it does so by blaming the victim and sanctifying the status quo.

Patricia Crone

#3. ideas generate action when they are believed regardless of whether they are true or not in our opinion

Patricia Crone

#4. we are here confronted with an irreducible oddity about all human societies: all are strung around figments of the human imagination.

Patricia Crone

#5. The fact that the doctrine makes perfect sense even though Epiphanius keeps finding it incoherent suggests that he is giving a faithful account of it.

Patricia Crone

#6. Most people, and certainly all members of Western civilization, are [...] born into a world which differs radically from that of their ancestors, with the result that most of human history is a closed book to them.

Patricia Crone

#7. It is probably safe to say that in strongly hierarchical societies the only people to whom something approaching nationalist sentiments can be attributed in pre-modern times is the ruling elite, and then only at times.

Patricia Crone

#8. Since people of necessity see things from their own perspective, much of what they say adds up to comforting ideas or outright propaganda for themselves and the groups to which they belong.

Patricia Crone

#9. It's remote! It's remote! It's uncontaminated! It's pure! It's a place where we can rule out that Muhammad got his ideas from others than God!

Patricia Crone