Thomas Cahill

"For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life."

"The Irish... developed a form of confession that was exclusively private and that had no equivalent on the continent. In the ancient church, confession of one's sins—and the subsequent penance... had …"

"Whereas elsewhere in Europe, no educated man would be caught dead speaking a vernacular, the Irish thought that all language was game—and too much fun to be deprived of any part of it. They were still…"

"For the most part, in the union of Greco-Roman with Judeo-Christian, the Greco-Roman turn of mind combined with Judeo-Christian values. While the outward form of the Western world remained Greco-Roman…"

"The five-hundred-bushelers... were on average five, at most ten, times as rich as the thetes, the lowest grade of citizen. ...Today, the gap between, say, a municipal bus driver and a Fortune 500 CEO …"

"The Greek world will continue in almost constant cultural revolution from the time of Homer to the day Rome brings Greece to its knees in the second century B.C. ...the longest trajectory of fluid dev…"

"The idea of physical resurrection struck them as ghoulish. ...Matter is the very principle of unintelligibity . Best to be done with it. For the Jews, who had little of no belief in the immortality of…"

"More than a billion people in our world today survive on less than $370 a year, while Americans, who constitute five percent of the world's population, purchase fifty percent of its cocaine."