#crusades

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

#better #christianity #christians #crusades #east

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

#crusades #humor #missionaries #religion #experience

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#analogies #arabs #colonialism #crusades #europe

Men of God are not just born, they are formed ↗

— John Paul Warren

#john-paul #john-paul-warren #leadership #pastor-john-paul-warren #voice-of-the-nations

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

— Hilaire Belloc

#am #book #crusades #dull #i

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

— Ellis Peters

#crusades #equality #goodness #openmindedness #religion

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

#even #good #good idea #idea #like

The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs. ↗

— John Lothrop Motley

#crusades #great #improvement #made #serfs

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

— J. G. Stedman

#during #mad #now #religious #want

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

#because #blame #christianity #crusades #did