Quotes About Crusades

#1. The Crusades, like the conquests that followed, were as much about overcoming Europe's monetary shortage as about converting heathens to Christianity.14

Niall Ferguson

#2. There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.

Salman Rushdie

#3. Every government, left or right, always engages in moral crusades. What else are they supposed to do? Especially when they make war; any war has to be a moral crusade.

Richard Rorty

#4. And then earlier than that there were the crusades. The crusades were totally fucked. Richard the Lionheart, who had the heart of a lion as well as his own. He ripped it out of the lion, and the lion was left with a bicycle pump and not much to do.

Eddie Izzard

#5. European institutions and the worldview of conquest and colonialism had formed several centuries before that. From the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, Europeans conducted the Crusades to conquer North Africa and the Middle East, leading to unprecedented wealth in the hands of a few.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#6. I read in the newspaper that the Catholic Church finally decided that it had been theologically improper to try to convert the Jews. Whoops! Sorry for all those inquisitions, crusades, and autos-da-fe. Previous popes were wrong - infallible, perhaps, but wrong.

Alan Dershowitz

#7. This war will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades. - by Arab League Secretary General Abdul Rahman Azzam

Sol Stern

#8. But I also saw a city still bruised and bleeding from years of crushing war. I saw souls darkened by loss and bitterness in the crusades. I saw faith destroyed after the brutality we'd endured in its name.

Julie Berry

#9. All wars are crusades, or we're made to feel they are. That's just what's so wicked about them. We're made to feel - not think - and people can't think when they feel.

Margaret Ayer Barnes

#10. Hospitals are better and more reliable than miracle crusades.

Sunday Adelaja

#11. The Crusades - the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.

David Hume

#12. The greatest tragedy in the history of Christianity was neither the Crusades nor the Reformation nor the Inquisition, but rather the split that opened up between theology and spirituality at the end of the Middle Ages.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar

#13. But before Christianity was a rich and powerful religion, before it was associated with buildings, budgets, crusades, colonialism, or televangelism, it began as a revolutionary nonviolent movement promoting a new kind of aliveness on the margins of society.

Brian D. McLaren

#14. pilgrimages or crusades. Even a monk must

Ken Follett

#15. Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.

Amy Waldman

#16. During the crusades all were religious mad, and now all are mad for want of it.

J. G. Stedman

#17. Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#18. Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. This web allows humans alone to organise crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements.

Yuval Noah Harari

#19. Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.

Karen Armstrong

#20. Global warming' is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible.

Thomas Sowell

#21. TO BE "THE SEWER OF CHRISTENDOM and drain all the discords out of it" was the primary function of the Crusades,

Barbara W. Tuchman

#22. We have reason to believe that when, during the crusades, Europe at last began to establish hospitals, they were inspired by the Arabs of near East ... The first hospital in Paris, Les Quinze-vingt, was founded by Louis IX after his return from the crusade 1254-1260.

George Sarton

#23. I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it.

Hilaire Belloc

#24. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

Barack Obama

#25. But today, the United States is a shell of what we were back then. Several administrations have stripped the military to the bone and what we have left is off fighting the unending 21st century version of the Crusades.

Michael Koogler

#26. Every war is its own excuse. That's why they're all surrounded with ideals. That's why they're all crusades.

Karl Shapiro

#27. Let it be said, Marcus thought dryly,that nothing cooled a man's ardor like the Crusades.

Julia Quinn

#28. The whole history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions and wars, pogroms, jihads, crusades. I find it all very regrettable, to say the least.

Steven Weinberg

#29. If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#30. It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present day.

Johann Hari

#31. Current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth-century creation, prompted in part by 'post-World War I British and French imperialism and post-World War II creation of the state of Israel.

Rodney Stark

#32. The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans.

Howard Fineman

#33. Until the Crusades Islam was indistinguishable from Judaism and ... only then did it receive its independent character, while Muhammad and the first Caliphs are mythical figures.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov

#34. Christianity brought something new and revolutionary: freedom and unconditional dignity for each individual, regardless of his religion, culture or nationality. But the East and the West have parted ways since the Crusades.

Walter Kasper

#35. The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs.

John Lothrop Motley

#36. Because of GLHR's crusades ... we're beginning to learn the awful truth about workers around the world who are slaving away their lives in sweatshops, who are denied the right to join or form a union in order to fight back and provide a better life for their families.

John Sweeney

#37. I knew maps of the sea floor, maps that depict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that contain the various routes of the Crusades. So

Michael Ondaatje

#38. Arguably, the only fruit of the Crusades kept by the Christians was the apricot.

Norman Davies

#39. If many regard Islam as a religion of the sword, Muslims down through the ages have spoken of the West's Crusader mentality and ambitions. Therefore for Muslim-Christian relations, it is less a case of what actually happened in the Crusades than how they are remembered.

Sven Lange

#40. If there ever was a religious war full of terror, it was the crusades. But you can't blame Christianity because a few adventurers did this. That's my message.

Moustapha Akkad

#41. God called me many years ago to be an evangelist, and I have never regretted His leading. I love the crusades, meeting people from every country and culture all over the world. My life has been blessed by friends from every land, and challenges from every corner.

Billy Graham

#42. When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my 'museum'. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

#43. It is characteristic of all movements and crusades that the psychopathic element rises to the top.

Robert M. Lindner

#44. THE HISTORY OF THE middle ages presents no spectacle more imposing than the Crusades, in which are to be seen the nations of Asia and of Europe armed against each other, two religions contending for superiority, and disputing the empire of the world.

Jospeh Michaud

#45. Rehearsels, actually." "Rehearsals?" "For the-" Oh,no. "-musicale." The Smythe-Smith musical.It finished off what the Crusades had begun.There wasn't a man alive who could maintain a romantic thought when faced with the memory-or the threat-of a Smythe-Smith musicale.

Julia Quinn

#46. The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They sincerely believed that they served in God's battalions.

Rodney Stark

#47. [The tension] between the Christians and Muslims goes back to the Crusades, doesn't it? It's too easy to blame everything on one guy. These are unpredictable, dangerous times, and I don't think that anyone really knows quite what to do.

Mickey Rourke

#48. The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#49. [A] common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades
no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer.

Scott Anderson

#50. It's unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades for some principle or idea while neglecting the needs of its own people.

J. William Fulbright

#51. Many argue that Christianity is "different" from other religions - that it is primarily about love of one's fellow man. The Crusades, The Inquisition, Calvin's Geneva all prove that this is not the case. These events were pre-eminently about obedience to authority.

Andrew Bernstein

#52. When the British General, Allenby, victoriously entered Jerusalem in October 1917 he declared "today the Crusades have ended".

Anonymous

#53. In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that.

Stanley Hauerwas

#54. Your final hour," he said aloud, picturing the thousands of Muslims slaughtered during the Crusades. "At midnight you will meet your God." Behind him, the woman stirred. The Hassassin turned. He considered letting her wake up. Seeing terror in a woman's eyes was his ultimate aphrodisiac

Anonymous

#55. Policies are judged by their consequences but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel.

Thomas Sowell

#56. None of us can predict when the causes we support will capture the public imagination, and our once-lonely quests become popular crusades.

Paul Rogat Loeb

#57. When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

Noam Chomsky

#58. The first two crusades brought the flower of European chivalry to Constantinople and restored that spiritual union between Eastern and Western Christendom that had been interrupted by the great schism of the Greek and Roman Churches.

Joseph Jacobs

#59. By now the crusaders had christened the most powerful French catapult 'Mal Voisine', or 'Bad Neighbour', while nicknaming the Muslim stone-thrower that targeted it for conter-bombardment 'Mal Cousine', or 'Bad Relation'.

Thomas Asbridge

#60. We're on record. We're part of the crusade. We're not backing down.

Julian Fantino

#61. What was distinctively Western was not slavery but the moral crusade to end slavery.

Dinesh D'Souza

#62. You [the employees] are involved in a crusade.

Herb Kelleher

#63. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.

George W. Bush

#64. There was one thing I was never going to do
no way: preach at a crusade!

Franklin Graham

#65. The modern mind is hard to please; and it generally calls the way of Godfrey ferocious and the way of Francis fanatical. That is, it calls any moral method unpractical, when it has just called any practical method immoral.

G.K. Chesterton

#66. Men of God are not just born, they are formed

John Paul Warren

#67. Regard the Franj! Behold with what obstinacy they fight for their religion, while we, the Muslims, show no enthusiasm for waging holy war.

Kenneth S. Saladin

#68. And that is what the perception is by the American left, who hates Christendom.

Rick Santorum

#69. I have always known that the best of the Saracens could out-Christian many of us Christians.

Ellis Peters

#70. Forget the threat of Hell's infernal flames. The true torture would condemn a man to wait and wait and wait - for an eternity

Sharon Kay Penman

#71. Isn't it amazing that, historically, the "Prince of Peace" has most often been introduced to new cultures through extreme violence? European and American colonialists bring this disparity to light in a way that makes me wish that forced conversion didn't work so extraordinarily well.

David G. McAfee

#72. A good journalistic organisation upholds four values: inform, reflect, crusade, connect.

Jane Eisner

#73. He knew from experience that true and obvious ideas, such as the ineffable wisdom and judgment of the Great God Om, seemed so obscure to many people that you actually had to kill them before they saw the error of their ways ...

Terry Pratchett

#74. Any crusade requires optimism and the ambition to aim high

Paul Allen