The outburst of the first crusade was splendid even in a military sense, but it was great beyond comparison in its reflexion in architecture, ornament, poetry, color, religion and philosophy. Its men were astonishing, and its women were worth all the rest.

...I truly believe that the First Crusade was comparable to World War I in the way that it introduced into Europe a new and extraordinary brutal style of combat and in the way that, in the crusade’s aftermath, nothing looked quite the same as it once had done.

The one who fights according to the sense of 'sacred war' is spontaneously beyond every particularism and exists in a spiritual climate which, at any given moment, may very well give rise and life to a supra-national unity of action. This is precisely what occurred in the Crusades when Princes and Dukes of every land gathered in the heroic and sacred enterprise, regardless of their particular utilitarian interests or political divisions, bringing about for the first time a great European unity, true to the common civilisation and to the very principle of the Sacred Roman Empire.

There are four great events in history, the siege of Troy, the life and crucifixion of Christ, the exile of Krishna in Brindaban and the colloquy on the field of Kurukshetra. The siege of Troy created Hellas, the exile in Brindaban created devotional religion, (for before there was only meditation and worship), Christ from his cross humanized Europe, the colloquy at Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity.

In the sixteenth century, Europe was like a bucking bronco. The attempt of some groups to establish a world-economy based on a particular division of labor, to create national states in the core areas as politico-economic guarantors of this system, and to get the workers to pay not only the profits but the costs of maintaining the system was not easy. It was to Europe's credit that it was done, since without the thrust of the sixteenth century the modern world would not have been born and, for all its cruelties, it is better that it was born than that it had not been.
It is also to Europe's credit that it was not easy, and particularly that it was not easy because the people who paid the short-run costs screamed lustily at the unfairness of it all. The peasants and workers in Poland and England and Brazil and Mexico were all rambunctious in their various ways. As R. H. Tawney says of the agrarian disturbances of sixteenth-century England: 'Such movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit... Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.'
The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century.

Were the crusades a clash of civilizations? In brief, yes. That at least is the answer that the crusaders would have given. And the idea didn't die with them. In the centuries following, historians, whether celebrating or condemning the crusades, whether seeing them born of faith or colonial greed, nonetheless discussed them in terms of Islam vs. Christianity and East vs. West.

He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.

It was the bringing together of a warring multiplicity under the unifying doctrines of Christianity that civilized Europe.

From a long view of the history of mankind — seen from, say, ten thousand years from now — there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.

From a long view of the history of mankind, seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade.

September of the year 490 B.C. was to my mind a more cardinal moment of fate for Europe than August 1914. Western civilization...was saved in its infancy at Marathon, and ten years later by Leonidas and by the men of Salamis...had it not been for that decade there would have been nothing to prevent Eastern Europe being orientalized and the ultimate fight for the hegemony of Europe would have been left to the Persians and the Carthaginians. But for the Greeks there would have been no civilization as we know it, and we should all have been dark-skinned people with long noses...England is the natural home of liberty and free institutions, and in her endeavour to secure these blessings for the world no country ought to be quicker than she in acknowledging her debt to Hellas.

While these things were going on in South Africa – one of the greatest dramas in the recent history of the world – the same conditions were reproducing themselves in the greater world outside. From the Boer War onwards a new spirit seemed to have permeated the nations of Europe. The nineteenth century had been called the century of nationality, but the early years of the twentieth century were years of intense nationalism, morbid nationalism. Nations lost their heads in efforts at self aggrandisement, and this had become so intense and so selfish that a clash became inevitable. Again you see a problem in holism. Where there should have been a united family of nations we saw the elements drifting apart, we saw disunity and disruption, and we saw in the end the greatest crash in the history of the world. When the Great War ended there was the same problem in holism. I think the League of Nations is a genuine effort in reconstructing the broken front of European civilisation, of once more reforming unity out of division and discord.

There is a lot of talk about the so-called "European values," but we Europeans no longer know who we are. A thousand years ago, despite many battles, many betrayals, there was Christianity as a common factor to unify us. Europe was based on Christianity. Now, this common base no longer exists. We are united only by the market, by money; it has become very difficult to cement Europe. On what? Who are we? We do not know. How can we oppose Russia's expansionist ambitions if we do not know who we are, if we do not remain united in our historical foundation, which is Christianity?

As we get further away from the England of the nineteenth century, and see it separated from us by the great gulf of the war, we shall perhaps be better able to see it as it really was, to appreciate its extraordinary greatness, its peculiar faults and flaws, and to a remarkable degree its unity. Beyond question it was a very great age indeed. For Great Britain especially it marked the zenith of national success, the widest expansion over the world of British government, British commerce, British political thought, British morals, philosophy, science, poetry and prose literature. It was a time when Indian rajahs and Chinese mandarins learnt to play cricket and read Macaulay, as now they are learning baseball and frequenting the movies.